I would. I hate Putin, I think he's at least as evil as some of the worst leaders through history, but he's also not stupid.
Putin can get away with what he's doing becaus the Russian people support it. The Russians are however weak when it comes to standing firm when reality hits them in the face. Putin got away with what he did in Ukraine because he was able to keep the deaths of hundreds of Russian soldiers largely out of the press, and dismiss those who did tell their stories as full of shit.
He's able to get away with what he's doing in Syria because there are no boots on the ground and so hardly any risk to Russian soldiers. The chance of a shoot down at the altitude Russian sorties are being flown at is pretty negligible.
But if reality comes to bite Russians by way of a terrorist attack against them due to Putin's actions in Syria then that will be a massive blow to Putin's ability to keep up the tempo.
Russians are still raw from Afghanistan in the 80s, because whilst they were defeated largely as the Americans were in Vietnam, the defeat was felt much more greatly for the Russians because it was really the turning point at which the Soviet Union begin to see it's collapse, and that was followed by a decade (the 90s) of severe economic problems. They didn't just lose a war with Afghanistan, they lost their empire including both what little wealth they did have, and what influence in the world they had also.
The Russians want another Afganistan even less than the Americans want another Afghanistan or Iraq right now. When Russians, civilian or military, start coming home in body bags and Putin can't hide it, then Putin will come under immense pressure to reconsider his support for Assad and the Syrian regime. That's precisely why Putin and his regime are so desperate to declare this not a bomb.
But all this said, I'm not convinced it's ISIS either. If it was ISIS why now, why against Russia when British and American tourists could presumably have been just as easily targeted at the exact same airport all this time and ISIS hates the British and Americans as much as the Russians? Why on a plane so perfectly full of Russians bar the 3 Ukrainians on board? Why weren't ISIS able to say how they destroyed the plane if it was them, only claiming they shot it down, which has been dismissed as a possibility and the likely method was a bomb? I don't think any conspiracy theory involving the Americans or British is likely, it'd just be way too risky for them to get involved blowing up Russian civilians. I don't even think it's a play they'd want to make. If I had to guess I'd wager it's more likely to be anyone from Israel, to Qatar, to the Saudis - none of these countries particularly give a shit about Russia's feelings because Russia has sided with their arch enemies - Iran and Syria, and both don't want to see Assad propped up.
But who knows, I'm just guessing as much as the next guy there's a lot that's a little weird about this case though. The other possibility being of course that it simply isn't a bomb and the tail half of the plane genuinely just ripped away somehow, that too would explain why ISIS claim of blame doesn't really make any kind of sense, but then why are the British and Americans so certain of evidence of a bomb declaring they detected a heat flash and cancelling flights and so forth?
No, they have a weak majority in the commons and no majority in the lords. They've actually scaled back a lot of controversial parts of the bill for this reason - they want it to pass, that's why apart from web tracking this is a relatively tame bill.
Things like VPN blocking were axed because they couldn't face yet another rebellion in the commons, or another defeat in the Lords. 75% of the governments bills in the 6 months they've been in power have been defeated in the Lords so far.
VPN blocking wont be coming back, they it's not a politically viable option for them and they know it. Other things that were scaled back on in the same way were allowing the Home Secretary to be the sole authoriser or the hacking warrants and so forth. A judge is now involved in this process.
I'm still not 100% confident that web tracking will make it through the commons and Lords for what it's worth. It's far and away the most controversial aspect of the bill still and an easy target for anyone wishing to make life hard for the government, which is basically everyone right now. The only reason it will go through is if Labour forgets they're an independent party capable of standing up to the Tories, something they have forgotten so far on this bill. When their own MPs start asking questions, and people like Tom Watson (now deputy to the leader of the opposition) who you may remember stood almost alone in opposing the awful Digital Economy Act which is own party was putting forward at the time there may be a chance the Labour position will change, if it does I suspect enough Tory MPs will rebel, and the Lords will certainly block.
Put simply, whether this bill becomes law is more up to Labour now than it is the Conservatives due to the Labour/Lib majority in the Lords and the weak majority in the commons forcing the requirement of Labour support on many votes to see off Conservative rebels.
The problem is that the UK elects almost entirely based on economic competence. I believe that not one election in the last 100 years has been won by anything other than the party that was polling highest in public perception of economic competence at the time.
The fact is, that this election, the Tories were the only ones that put forward a compelling argument that they were the most economically competent. Labour was still fumbling over what it's economic policy even was frequently contradicting past claims of policy until a week before the election.
The Tories didn't win this election so much as Labour lost it. It was Labour's for the taking and they absolutely fucked it. Whilst I voted against the Conservatives, I can fully well understand why they were elected - the opposition just offered no compelling case as to why they would be a better party to run the country other than "We're not those guys!".
But let's be clear here, Labour also supports this bill and has put forward this bill in the past. Even under Jeremy Corbyn, the most hard left leader Labour has seen in decades, Labour is allowing Andy Burnham to jump forth and declare that Labour fully supports this bill and will not seek to amend this provision or block the bill on the basis of it. This is perhaps unsurprising as even when Labour dropped Blair and subsequently lurched to the centre left under Brown proposals for this sort of law (in fact, with even worse provisions than this one) were common place.
So I don't think right-wing assholes has much to do with it as apparently the left-wing assholes want it just as much. I think the real problem here is simply the assholes regardless of political leaning.
Yes, this has always been my concern with most internet monitoring laws, and Theresa May even said it herself once without quite grasping what she'd actually said, saying one thing and thinking it meant another. She once said "We need to build a bigger haystack". No we don't Theresa, we need to get better at finding the fucking needle, not make it harder to find.
Perhaps the biggest argument I've often made for this is the fact that every single time there is a fucking terrorist attack in the West, it turns out that the perpetrator was known to security services. Lee Rigby's murderers were held by Kenyan security services and MI5 tried to recruit them. The 7/7 and Glasgow airport attackers had all previously been on MI5's radar. The Charlie Hebdo attackers were known to French security services, as was Canada's parliament attacker. The US security services had been alerted to the Boston bombers by the Russian security services. It's the same story time and time again, these attackers don't turn up out of the blue, consistently they're people who have long been on the radar and have reached a point of radicalisation where they decide to cross the line. If we can't even stop people that we know think this sort of terrorist attack is okay, then what the fuck will logging everyone's data achieve? Already security services can't properly vet the risks of people they know about, so even if they get good at pulling additional people out of this data, then what use is that if they still can't properly vet them anyway?
Given that this is something that's being pushed for by the police, my suspicion is that they're basically asking the UK to give up privacy simply so that the police can catch the low hanging fruit - people who visit known paedophile sites without any kind of obscuring of that fact (for example, by using Tor). They want to be able, once a year, to grab the list of data, compare it against a list of known paedophile websites, and then go out and do a massive publicity gandering raid where they bust down the doors of the hundreds of people they find on this list and then claim yeah, we smashed a massive paedophile ring, not giving a toss about the innocents caught in the crossfire because their PC had been hacked and used as a proxy for the actual perpetrator, just like last time they did this sort of thing after the authorities in America sent them a massive list of credit cards used on such a website.
You'll have to excuse me therefore if I'm not convinced that this justifies the death of privacy.
I think you're right to cast aside the slippery slope argument FWIW, I don't put much weight in that view. Frankly if government goes bad, then it'll do that anyway regardless of what the law says - I've not seen the US constitution have any effect on flagrant violations by successive governments in the US since 9/11 for example. I don't think it's worth worrying about slippery slope stuff because if government goes bad you're already fucked regardless of what the law at that point pretends your rights are.
I think it's far better to concentrate on the actual problems here and now, rather than worrying too much speculating or screaming about slides towards police states and so on- that type of argument never gets us anywhere, because most people in the general public scoff at it and see it as nonsense. It's far better to simply focus on making it clear to people that this move wont have any impact in preventing terrorism, and will mean the police will know everything about their lives.
"but in the British courts truth isn't a defense against defamation."
Of course it is, but not only that, but the claim can be false and you can still defend yourself if you can prove that you genuinely believed the claim to be true - for example, if someone else previously sent you the claim in an e-mail, and you then went to check the veracity of the claim and a number of newspapers were also printing the falsehood then you could reasonably argue that you were simply repeating something that you would have absolutely no reason to believe is false.
The biggest problem with the UK's implementation is that it allowed for people outside the UK to bring their quarrel to the UK to be decided. The actual implementation in the UK isn't massively unreasonable. You can only get fucked with a libel/slander suit if you were making false statements about anyone without having put any effort into checking whether they were true or false.
You're arguing that if you make a truthful claim about someone that it's not a defence, but that's wholly false, of course it's a defence. You may have to prove why you think it's truthful though and then it's a question of how truthful it actually is, do you merely think it's truthful when it may not be or can you actually show that it is?
Yep, it's the web tracking that makes this bill awful. If it weren't for that section the bill wouldn't actually be that bad as security bills go because it's largely an improvement on the status quo - i.e. bringing the judiciary into the issuing of warrants for digital searches and interception is a good thing and an acceptable measure IMO. We already allow judges to issue warrants to smash people's doors down and that's typically seen as acceptable, so I have few qualms with a digital equivalent. Our judiciary are typically good on this front and I have far more trust in them than I do the Home Secretary. The other stuff about banning VPNs and encryption was, as I suspected, bullshit, and the bill says nothing about these things contrary to claims in the summary.
But the web tracking needs to be stopped, Theresa May has completely understated the implications of what she's proposing claiming it's just like an itemised phone bill. It's not. An itemised phone bill at best tells people who you've called. A list of domains you've visited can tell people everything from your sexuality, to where you shop, to where you bank, to where you plan to go on holiday, to where you work, to who your service providers are, whether you're having or seeking to have an affair (e.g. Ashley Madison), where you get your news from, and so on. As I understand it, the security services weren't too bothered about this power (presumably because they're already intercepting way more than this), and it was actually the police that pushed for this particular measure and yet it's the police I trust with access to this data the least because the police have the lowest barriers to entry, the largest staff count, and the greatest interaction with the public that they can now spy on and so are the most likely to abuse it.
It's this argument I'll be making to my MP but I don't hold up much hope for this being blocked given that unsurprisingly Labour backs it in part because one of the biggest slimeballs in partliament, Andy Burnham backs it, and Corbyn still seems to be unable to find anything even slightly representing a spine when he now needs it the most since he's, you know, supposed to be some kind of leader now. Mass use of VPNs by the public will be the only realistic option to fight this.
I don't need a precedent, because it's not something that's affected by precedent - another legal misunderstanding on your part.
The fact is you simply don't know what argument Snowden will make in court, you don't know what fumbles the prosecution might make that could nullify their case, you don't know what instruments Snowden's lawyer maybe able to use including appeals to conflicting or higher law (i.e. perhaps a clause in the constitution) and you don't know what loopholes a great lawyer maybe able to find. You don't know these things because the trial hasn't happened, and because you're blatantly not a lawyer.
Yet despite this, you're still claiming the outcome is predetermined, and the only way to ever be sure of that is if there was no opportunity for a fair trial in the first place. Again, I'll make it abundantly clear - in a fair trial there can be absolutely no pre-supposition about the outcome.
The case against Oscar Pistorius for murder was pretty cut and dried too, but it turns out that if you fire a gun through a door at someone you couldn't possibly know that you might kill them. The fact is that judicial systems can throw up some pretty nonsensical claims that create conditions for outcomes that we would never expect and to hence pre-judge the outcome of a trial and suggest it's just a formality is incredibly naive and stupid. It's that idiocy you're displaying that highlights how little you know, and how naive you are when it comes to legal matters, and it's for that reason that you should probably just stop digging.
"Pot meet kettle."
Well at least you admit you've no idea what you're talking about if nothing else, even if you falsely imply I have no idea to. The difference is I'm not the one pretending to know things that I don't, whereas you're making claims about things you couldn't possibly know. You're allowing your political bias to interfere with your attempt at arguing that facts, and it's causing you to fail hard at achieving anything - you're not achieving your political aims of getting people to agree that we should just fuck justice and lynch Snowden because you're using an argument that's intellectually bankrupt and trivial for anyone with even the most basic understanding of law and justice to see right through.
Of course it's about mass surveillance, if it was about individual surveillance then they'd just get a warrant to MITM or similar a particular suspects PC exactly like they always have with physical mail and phone calls. They already have the powers to do that type of attack to get a target of a warrant.
They might argue that it's about retaining data so if they come back to someone they can investigate their communications retroactively, but that doesn't explain why they aren't getting all phone calls logged, and all physical mail photocopied and stored. They already can't get historical data of other communication mediums so there's no reason to think they suddenly need it for investigations using digital communications.
So the only thing this possibly can be about is mass surveillance given that they have all the tools they need for individual surveillance already.
Please don't ever try and be a lawyer, your understanding of the law, and your insistence that you know it when you simply have no idea what path Snowden's lawyers would take is painful to watch.
You still don't even grasp the basic concepts of trials, let alone have any idea whatsoever what legal routes Snowden's lawyers could take.
You're just an internet commentator commenting way above your knowledge and intelligence level on the topic. It's embarrassing.
"Nobody (except me) has presented any reason why the ECHR should intervene that actually uses legal terms correctly."
The ECourtHR is not something that intervenes unless it receives a case. If Snowden moved to a European country, that country decided to extradite him, and he filed an appeal to the ECHR then the ECHR is duty bound to consider hearing that appeal, which it would do if it genuinely thought there was a chance of maltreatment. Something it has determined in a number of US extradition cases FWIW - in large part because the US prison system is deemed to be a fucking joke with no effort whatsoever put into rehabilitation or support given for vulnerable prisoners to sort them the fuck out rather than for them to face a high risk of suicide and being killed - the ECHR recognises that sending people to their death is just fucking wrong. That for what it's worth, is in itself grounds to deny US extradition - no one can be extradited from Europe to the US if there's a substantial risk of the death penalty being imposed. Should the ECHR determine trumps threat to kill Snowden coupled with Snowden's presidential bid to be a subsequent possibility, then that in itself would be enough to deny extradition to the US.
"a Fair Trial for Ed Snowden always results in a conviction"
You still completely lack any comprehension of what a fair trial is. A fair trial pre-supposes absolutely nothing. It doesn't matter what he has said out of court - it could just as well be that he's being pressured by the Russians and the Chinese for all you know, and court would be the place for him to open up about that. Maybe his wife leaked the fucking documents and is taking the rap. You don't know. I'm not claiming for one moment that that's the case, but precisely because that sort of thing can be the case is why court cases are started with no presupposition of guilt, yet that's exactly what you're saying they should do, they should be unfair trials, based on hearsay. That's not a court, that's a fucking witch hunt.
The fact you don't understand that shows an insane lack of comprehension about the legal process by you, and so I don't even know why you'd feel remotely qualified to make a post on such a topic. You don't even understand how courts work at the most basic level.
"Who said anything about want?"
I said want because I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt - there's two possibilities here, the first is that you're a flagrant retard, hence why you don't even have a primary school level understanding of justice, the second is that you're just an anti-Snowden zealot who is trying to justify somehow why he should go straight to punishment.
If you want I can play your game, and accept that yes, you've not openly admitted that's your view, I can pretend you're a flagrant retard instead if that's preferable, but most mature people have the courage of their convictions to admit what they actually want. I don't know, maybe you are just as clueless about justice and Western courts as you're pretending? Maybe you do have a pre-school level of knowledge on the subject? I'd like to think that's not the case and you're just playing dumb for politics though and you're too cowardly to say what you really mean - that you want to see Snowden punished.
"If you want to change the subject to the ECHR you can do that, but you'll have to explain why the ECHR would apply."
Well that's already been done, but you seem unable to stick to the thread of discussion. I should you step right back to the beginning and start again, because you're arguing that I can't bring something up, that is relevant to the actual thread of discussion based on the summary. Believe it or not, discussions on forums can arch from the strict bounds of the original summary.
"A fair trial is a trial where the defendant has the right to properly respond to the evidence. If said evidence is truly overwhelming, the tiral is basically a formality. Just ask Lars Ulbricht."
No, that's not a fair trial, that's a kangaroo court. A fair trial is where no assumptions are made before hand, yet you're arguing that the trial is largely irrelevant (a formality). That by definition is not a fair trial, if the trial is a formality then it's anything but a fair trial because you're implying the decision is already made. You apparently don't even have a basic grasp of what justice is, and it's probably not surprising therefore that you're arguing that Snowden should jump into a situation where there's a fair chance he wont get it.
I can only assume therefore that you're either astoundingly ignorant, or you're trying to justify why Snowden should get fucked because that's politically what you want - in other words you're a rabid wingnut that wants not a fair trial, but exactly the opposite. Sorry, I have no time for that kind of retardation, there's enough of that in places like North Korea, China, and Russia without making it more commonplace in the West as well.
"And how is the European Convention on Human Rights related to a non-binding resolution passed by a body which does not have the legal authority to make a binding resolution in the first place?"
I'm not sure you know how such conventions work. European conventions are imposed on member states as things that must be implemented. Each member state has a legal implementation that is binding, and that can be ruled upon by the European Court of Human Rights (they can also rule whether the implementation meets the standards of the legally bound to implement convention).
"He's accused of leaking classified information. He did it. He's admitted as much in several public interviews. There is no leaker's defense in the US."
None of which has any relevance as to whether he'd get a fair trial. I'm not sure you really get how this whole justice thing works - hint: judgements are not decided upon what did or didn't happen in the spotlight of the media, only what happens in the court room.
"The absolute last person in the world who wants a fair trial is Ed Snowden, because a fair trial results in a conviction. The absolute last people in the world who want to unfairly try Ed Snowden are the US Government, because the only way for them to lose a case like this is unfairly try it."
Yep, and that's why Guantanamo detainees were treated so fairly over the yea... oh wait, no, they weren't. It's a bit of a stretch to pretend the US circa 1971 is the same as the UK circa 2015. The last 15 years has provide a plethora of evidence that the quality of the US justice system has seen a profound slide away from fairness.
"And again, this isn't the ECHR that's ruled. I doubt it could rule, seeing as he's not in Europe. It probably needs him to be there, and a US request for extradition,l before it can consider the issues."
I know people on Slashdot don't read the article, but you could at least read the summary and follow the thread, where we're speculating about how well protected he'd be if he moved to a European nation which was basically the entire point of my post.
There are a number of issues with the US justice system that act as barriers for extradition and that a number of requested extraditions to the US have been denied on. The two issues are:
- The US has a terrible modern track record on justice relating to national security cases both because of Guantanamo bay, and the way other whistleblowers such as Manning were treated. Typically this sort of thing can be dealt with with legal guarantees to the extraditing nation, but I believe the US has reneged on some of these agreements in the past, especially regarding Guantanamo, and so this means such legal guarantees from the US about treatment of prisoners no longer hold much weight.
- The US prison system is fundamentally broken, both in terms of failing to rehabilitate, general treatment in jail (i.e. high rates of assault including sexual assault) and in terms of an extraordinarily high incarceration rate.
I agree with you though, I'm not suggesting Snowden would be disappeared, but the standards required to extradite someone like this where there is a high risk of political prejudice impacting things just aren't being well met by the US.
If Snowden was extradited now, but one of the Republican wing nuts rather than a moderate got the presidency next year like Trump then do you really think Snowden would be completely free from the risk of not getting a fair trial? Do you believe that someone like Trump wouldn't try and get him in front of a military court when Trump has even suggested Snowden should be killed?
Now I don't think Snowden's life would necessarily be at risk, but I could quite imagine him being given a trial in front of a kangaroo court, especially if someone like Trump were to win the presidency, and that's the sort of thing that the ECHR has to consider - not just the situation now, but what the risks are if the situation changes because of change of leader, and sadly, right now, Trump is not the most likely candidate, but certainly not completely implausible either.
No he's right, it was a political union designed to bind Europe together to make another war unthinkable. NATO was designed to stop Russia (well, the USSR at the time) marching into Europe to undo all of that which is exactly as Russia is trying to do again now with it's invasion into Ukraine and it's funding of far right europhobic political groups like France's FN, the UK's UKIP, and Greece's Golden Dawn whose main policies are to pull their respective countries out of the EU, hence weakening the EU and opening the door further for Russian intrusion.
Both were certainly primarily created to keep Europe from war, although NATO also protects the likes of Canada's northern borders and Alaska too of course.
Not one extradition treaty in an EU member state overrules the European Convention on Human Rights which all EU member states are signatories to and members of.
The lack of the US' ability to guarantee Snowden will be granted a fair trial, means that any extradition treaty will be irrelevant in the face of a European Court of Human Rights challenge using the European Convention on Human Rights and it's implementations.
This is precisely why the convention and court exist - to prevent any member state treating someone unfairly in violation of their fundamental rights by acting as a higher power that can determine if a member government is treating people within it's borders fairly or not. It's a fine example of the importance of it all, it's one entity that can tell governments it doesn't give a shit how much they wish to kowtow to the US, fundamental human rights come first.
Of course a nation state could break protocol and ignore an ECHR ruling, but then it also doesn't get to dictate to places like China, Russia, and so forth about human rights anymore, because it would then be hypocritical and meaningless to do so.
"Internet regulation is only needed when there's a monopoly."
Nonsense, companies are equally capable of acting in concert with each other to price fix. The big 6 energy companies in the UK are a prime example of this.
Competition isn't much use if businesses just work together to agree not to compete on certain things because they know there's more profit for all of them in them acting as a cartel, than there is in competing with each other.
"because frankly, what private citizen will need a lot of international calls, Europeans don't move routinely halfway across the continent other than US-Americans"
Speak for yourself. My wife goes to Brussels for work fairly frequently, but doesn't have a work phone (she doesn't really need one, or want one) so it's nice that she can still phone home or text home without any additional cost when this comes into effect.
Similarly we have a wedding in France next year, and we regularly go on weekend trips to the continent. The fact this law includes phone calls, text, and data, is fantastic. The fact I'll be able to use Google maps for GPS anywhere in Europe now without facing an extortionate data bill is an amazing change. I no longer have to turn my smartphone into a dumb phone by disabling data every time I step on a fucking plane or boat.
I doubt this will increase costs at home, because frankly there is enough competition to ensure that wont happen. It'll also incentivise networks across Europe to enter into each national market, and hence increase competition further.
Yes, I'm pissed off about the weak net neutrality protections too. But the roaming change is a massively beneficial incredibly pro-consumer move, to paint it otherwise is frankly retarded.
"winning is all there is. Those are the players you have to deal with and while they typically are cowards, they can go off much like a explosive, if they are triggered by an excess of frustration. Would they hunt and stalk the female speakers, if those speakers we seen as victims by the psychopaths, most definitely."
I don't think it's really got anything to do with victimhood, or sex or anything like that as I've seen the exact same behaviour on forums, and even here on Slashdot.
Many years ago I made a post about Iran's nuclear programme and the IAEA's opinion on it in response to someone here on Slashdot - they were making claims that were verifiably false (I posted the IAEA reports to show what the IAEA actually claimed, rather than what the posted was claiming they claimed). I believe this was back in about 2008 or so. The argument was something like "The US is in the wrong because even the IAEA says Iran isn't seeking nuclear weapons!" but the IAEA reports didn't say that - the IAEA reports said they didn't know if they were or weren't because Iran had blocked them from obtaining the necessary information to verify that they weren't. I pointed out that that's not quite the same thing, that the suggestion that IAEA had absolved Iran was false, that it had merely said it couldn't confirm either way. My argument wasn't really anything other than that - a correct of what the IAEA said, by simply quoting and linking to what the IAEA had said.
A couple of months ago I made a post on a completely unrelated topic, a light hearted joking comment about people on Slashdot never being wrong. So imagine my surprise when looking at my comment history to see replies, to notice this comment that had been made two weeks prior having a reply to it suddenly. The creepy bit? The reply was dredging up the point I'd made in this discussion from at least 5 years ago about Iran's nuclear programme seemingly implying he was still right. Clearly the poster in question similarly has the same kind of psychopathic tendencies you refer to to hold a grudge for all this time over being proven wrong by actual citations of 1st hand sources, and over what? a largely meaningless debate on Slashdot from many years ago. Frankly when I saw the post it took me a while to even remember the original discussion, and I was trying to think what recent discussion he'd been referring to. It's only after a while that I realised he was dragging something up from so very long ago - it's a topic I don't really give much of a shit about nowadays because it's largely resolved which is why at first I couldn't fathom what he was talking about given the lack of discussion on that topic here for a long time.
Personally it doesn't really bother me that someone has been holding this grudge against me all that time, that's really their problem to deal with not mine, and honestly being stalked by a nerd raged basement dweller is probably about the least scary (and frankly most amusing) thing I can think of - I see those poorly socialised nerd rage types on my morning commute as they fight each other to be first off the train with their worn Halo 3 collectors edition backpacks and so forth. But the point I'm making is that I don't think it's got anything to do with type of game, or whether you're male or female - it seems that psychopaths can exist in any environment, and if there is even the slightest most meaningless bit of competition (e.g. something as trivial as an online debate) then that's enough for them to pursue their perceived opponent over an extended period whether their target is scared of them or not, whether the target is male or female or not.
It's almost like a kind of severe nerd rage, but whilst most people get over their anger, these people just can't - it never goes away, it sticks with them, and they let it eat away at them indefinitely. I think you're right that these people are the ones that cheat in online games, and I suspect this is why - to them that anger must be avenged by any means necessary, there must be no l
America, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, half of Africa, most of China, most of the Middle East time to come back to daddy.
At least then we'll be big enough to bully Russia into giving Crimea back to Ukraine!
Yeah, the GP's conspiracy theory is rather comical when you consider that if anyone is supporting ISIS it's Russia by bombing pretty much only the rebels who have been fighting ISIS.
There's no mistake, Russia's actions in Syria bolster ISIS by hitting it's opponents, the fact this is a side effect of supporting the Syrian regime is neither here nor there. The effect is the same - Russian action is massively beneficial to ISIS as it's both barely targeted at them, and pushes previously moderates into their ranks.
A more logical step is to get a very fucking large, sharp, hooked anchor on a long run of chain, and drag it perpendicular to the direction of the cable until you either drag it up and can break the thing that way, or just cut through it with the sheer weight and sharpness of the anchor.
"Thing is, the US never stopped placing military assets near Russia. In the 90s Russian stopped its air patrols and cut back sea patrols due to lack of money, but the US didn't. The US has a lot of military bases near Russia too, which is has kept open."
It's also closed a lot too. The US trajectory was pretty clearly in the direction Russia wanted. You may have forgotten that the US wanted to build a missile shield in Europe because of the fear that Iran was building nuclear ICBMs and Russia was refusing to stop Iran doing this by joining necessary sanctions. America ultimately cancelled the project to appease Russian fears it was targetted at them, and only many years later did Russia agree separately to help deal with the Iran nuclear threat.
The amount of American deployments in Europe was shrinking at a rapid pace right into the run up of the Ukraine crisis. In fact, I believe at the point the Ukraine crisis started there were no American MBTs left in Europe - this despite the fact that Russia had invaded a NATO ally and EU candidate, Georgia.
There was good reason for the US de-escalation towards Russia too - the US simply stopped caring about Russia being bothered instead by China and the Middle East. Even the US with it's military might has finite resources and it couldn't justify stationing equipment on Russia's border when it was bothered about increasing Chinese, Iranian (and before it's collapse, Syrian) adventurism. US forces had all been re-deployed to the Indian Ocean and Pacific to counter those concerns.
So what you say is almost entirely another Russian propaganda myth. See here for the type and scale of American draw down post-cold war we're talking about:
There was actually a serious push to bring Russia into NATO to seal the deal in terms of ending the cold war in the 90s, this ended when Putin rose to power and made it clear he wants to resurrect the USSR as an independent power. The last remnants of this plan were finally obliterated when Putin invaded Ukraine and the NATO-Russia cooperation agreements (that saw Russian military leaders staffed at NATO HQ) we're finally torn up.
So no, you can't blame military build up against Russia I'm afraid either. Russia is the only country that's actually been aggressive on that front with invasions of Georgia and Ukraine and Russia's unilateral decision to ignore a number of nuclear disarmament treaties (including that which promised Ukraine security in return for giving up it's nuclear arsenal). America had all but pulled out of Europe when Putin invaded Ukraine.
Really, the more the US has pulled out, the more Russia has pushed forward. Any US military expansionism in Europe is wholly the result of increased Russian aggression rather than vice versa.
There's literally no evidence that Russian aggression has increased in response to increase US military expansionism in Europe, only the complete contrary. The best part is all this information is public, so go see for yourself how much the US has drawn down it's forces in Europe since the end of the cold war.
Yep, the issues you raise regarding your Senate mirror the issues we have in the UK's House of Lords which is our equivalent. It sounds like Canada inherited all the worst ideas in our political system here in the UK that we too are stuck with and desperately need rid of:)
There's something like 816 peers in our House of Lords now and only 650 elected MPs. The last government was a coalition of the Liberal Democrats (centre left) and the Conservatives (centre right, with a roughly 20% - 30% hard right fringe to it). The Liberal Democrats wanted reform of the Lords, but the hard right in the Conservative despite being a vocal minority got their way as usual because their leader, our PM David Cameron is scared to death of them for whatever reason.
This makes the status quo even worse for us in some ways, because not only does a party with 38% of the vote have 100% of the power, but that 20% - 30% fringe of the Conservatives that are hard right have way more power than they're warranted.
"If we at least had a useful Senate then there might be some hope but seeing as they are all just appointed and would rather not rock the boat while getting their nice paychecks, what the PM wants the PM pretty much gets."
To be fair, this is a symptom of the first past the post system more than anything. Canada has been largely blessed over the years with a combination of fairly competent governments, or minority rule. It's only the last few years it's suffered from a bad majority that the problems of FPTP have come to the fore.
Here in the UK FPTP has long been a problem because we've constantly faced the exact problems you describe. The last parliament was the first coalition in about 60 years, but also a reasonably moderate government as a result. Unfortunately, we're still stuck with it though because one thing it didn't achieve was electoral reform (a stiched up vote for a new voting system that only had a bad choice rather than the choices people actually wanted, and Conservatives breaking their promise to reform the Lords).
So be glad at least that this is something Trudeau has promised to deal with, and make sure above all else that you hold him to that promise. If you can get him to move you to a more proportional system then you'll be in much better shape to avoid those issues. This is why Germany has a fairly decent parliament that's fairly successful and accountable to and representative of it's citizens - it's more proportional system means that parties are forced to compromise more and provide solutions that are at least somewhat acceptable to the majority, rather than unacceptable to the majority which is all too often the case under FPTP - for example, the current government in the UK got 38% of the vote, so 62% of the electorate voted against them, and yet that government will be forcing through laws regardless of what that 62% majority want. That's not really democracy.
So be careful not to take your eye off the real problem - your broken electoral system that's a copy of our broken electoral system. Make sure that if nothing else that that gets changed and then at least you only have 4 years until you can have a more representative form of governance. Achieve that and majorities will rarely be an issue - your subsequent governments will have to be more reasonable, more open to compromise, and more representative of the electorate.
Slashdot Mirror
I would. I hate Putin, I think he's at least as evil as some of the worst leaders through history, but he's also not stupid.
Putin can get away with what he's doing becaus the Russian people support it. The Russians are however weak when it comes to standing firm when reality hits them in the face. Putin got away with what he did in Ukraine because he was able to keep the deaths of hundreds of Russian soldiers largely out of the press, and dismiss those who did tell their stories as full of shit.
He's able to get away with what he's doing in Syria because there are no boots on the ground and so hardly any risk to Russian soldiers. The chance of a shoot down at the altitude Russian sorties are being flown at is pretty negligible.
But if reality comes to bite Russians by way of a terrorist attack against them due to Putin's actions in Syria then that will be a massive blow to Putin's ability to keep up the tempo.
Russians are still raw from Afghanistan in the 80s, because whilst they were defeated largely as the Americans were in Vietnam, the defeat was felt much more greatly for the Russians because it was really the turning point at which the Soviet Union begin to see it's collapse, and that was followed by a decade (the 90s) of severe economic problems. They didn't just lose a war with Afghanistan, they lost their empire including both what little wealth they did have, and what influence in the world they had also.
The Russians want another Afganistan even less than the Americans want another Afghanistan or Iraq right now. When Russians, civilian or military, start coming home in body bags and Putin can't hide it, then Putin will come under immense pressure to reconsider his support for Assad and the Syrian regime. That's precisely why Putin and his regime are so desperate to declare this not a bomb.
But all this said, I'm not convinced it's ISIS either. If it was ISIS why now, why against Russia when British and American tourists could presumably have been just as easily targeted at the exact same airport all this time and ISIS hates the British and Americans as much as the Russians? Why on a plane so perfectly full of Russians bar the 3 Ukrainians on board? Why weren't ISIS able to say how they destroyed the plane if it was them, only claiming they shot it down, which has been dismissed as a possibility and the likely method was a bomb? I don't think any conspiracy theory involving the Americans or British is likely, it'd just be way too risky for them to get involved blowing up Russian civilians. I don't even think it's a play they'd want to make. If I had to guess I'd wager it's more likely to be anyone from Israel, to Qatar, to the Saudis - none of these countries particularly give a shit about Russia's feelings because Russia has sided with their arch enemies - Iran and Syria, and both don't want to see Assad propped up.
But who knows, I'm just guessing as much as the next guy there's a lot that's a little weird about this case though. The other possibility being of course that it simply isn't a bomb and the tail half of the plane genuinely just ripped away somehow, that too would explain why ISIS claim of blame doesn't really make any kind of sense, but then why are the British and Americans so certain of evidence of a bomb declaring they detected a heat flash and cancelling flights and so forth?
No, they have a weak majority in the commons and no majority in the lords. They've actually scaled back a lot of controversial parts of the bill for this reason - they want it to pass, that's why apart from web tracking this is a relatively tame bill.
Things like VPN blocking were axed because they couldn't face yet another rebellion in the commons, or another defeat in the Lords. 75% of the governments bills in the 6 months they've been in power have been defeated in the Lords so far.
VPN blocking wont be coming back, they it's not a politically viable option for them and they know it. Other things that were scaled back on in the same way were allowing the Home Secretary to be the sole authoriser or the hacking warrants and so forth. A judge is now involved in this process.
I'm still not 100% confident that web tracking will make it through the commons and Lords for what it's worth. It's far and away the most controversial aspect of the bill still and an easy target for anyone wishing to make life hard for the government, which is basically everyone right now. The only reason it will go through is if Labour forgets they're an independent party capable of standing up to the Tories, something they have forgotten so far on this bill. When their own MPs start asking questions, and people like Tom Watson (now deputy to the leader of the opposition) who you may remember stood almost alone in opposing the awful Digital Economy Act which is own party was putting forward at the time there may be a chance the Labour position will change, if it does I suspect enough Tory MPs will rebel, and the Lords will certainly block.
Put simply, whether this bill becomes law is more up to Labour now than it is the Conservatives due to the Labour/Lib majority in the Lords and the weak majority in the commons forcing the requirement of Labour support on many votes to see off Conservative rebels.
The problem is that the UK elects almost entirely based on economic competence. I believe that not one election in the last 100 years has been won by anything other than the party that was polling highest in public perception of economic competence at the time.
The fact is, that this election, the Tories were the only ones that put forward a compelling argument that they were the most economically competent. Labour was still fumbling over what it's economic policy even was frequently contradicting past claims of policy until a week before the election.
The Tories didn't win this election so much as Labour lost it. It was Labour's for the taking and they absolutely fucked it. Whilst I voted against the Conservatives, I can fully well understand why they were elected - the opposition just offered no compelling case as to why they would be a better party to run the country other than "We're not those guys!".
But let's be clear here, Labour also supports this bill and has put forward this bill in the past. Even under Jeremy Corbyn, the most hard left leader Labour has seen in decades, Labour is allowing Andy Burnham to jump forth and declare that Labour fully supports this bill and will not seek to amend this provision or block the bill on the basis of it. This is perhaps unsurprising as even when Labour dropped Blair and subsequently lurched to the centre left under Brown proposals for this sort of law (in fact, with even worse provisions than this one) were common place.
So I don't think right-wing assholes has much to do with it as apparently the left-wing assholes want it just as much. I think the real problem here is simply the assholes regardless of political leaning.
Yes, this has always been my concern with most internet monitoring laws, and Theresa May even said it herself once without quite grasping what she'd actually said, saying one thing and thinking it meant another. She once said "We need to build a bigger haystack". No we don't Theresa, we need to get better at finding the fucking needle, not make it harder to find.
Perhaps the biggest argument I've often made for this is the fact that every single time there is a fucking terrorist attack in the West, it turns out that the perpetrator was known to security services. Lee Rigby's murderers were held by Kenyan security services and MI5 tried to recruit them. The 7/7 and Glasgow airport attackers had all previously been on MI5's radar. The Charlie Hebdo attackers were known to French security services, as was Canada's parliament attacker. The US security services had been alerted to the Boston bombers by the Russian security services. It's the same story time and time again, these attackers don't turn up out of the blue, consistently they're people who have long been on the radar and have reached a point of radicalisation where they decide to cross the line. If we can't even stop people that we know think this sort of terrorist attack is okay, then what the fuck will logging everyone's data achieve? Already security services can't properly vet the risks of people they know about, so even if they get good at pulling additional people out of this data, then what use is that if they still can't properly vet them anyway?
Given that this is something that's being pushed for by the police, my suspicion is that they're basically asking the UK to give up privacy simply so that the police can catch the low hanging fruit - people who visit known paedophile sites without any kind of obscuring of that fact (for example, by using Tor). They want to be able, once a year, to grab the list of data, compare it against a list of known paedophile websites, and then go out and do a massive publicity gandering raid where they bust down the doors of the hundreds of people they find on this list and then claim yeah, we smashed a massive paedophile ring, not giving a toss about the innocents caught in the crossfire because their PC had been hacked and used as a proxy for the actual perpetrator, just like last time they did this sort of thing after the authorities in America sent them a massive list of credit cards used on such a website.
You'll have to excuse me therefore if I'm not convinced that this justifies the death of privacy.
I think you're right to cast aside the slippery slope argument FWIW, I don't put much weight in that view. Frankly if government goes bad, then it'll do that anyway regardless of what the law says - I've not seen the US constitution have any effect on flagrant violations by successive governments in the US since 9/11 for example. I don't think it's worth worrying about slippery slope stuff because if government goes bad you're already fucked regardless of what the law at that point pretends your rights are.
I think it's far better to concentrate on the actual problems here and now, rather than worrying too much speculating or screaming about slides towards police states and so on- that type of argument never gets us anywhere, because most people in the general public scoff at it and see it as nonsense. It's far better to simply focus on making it clear to people that this move wont have any impact in preventing terrorism, and will mean the police will know everything about their lives.
"but in the British courts truth isn't a defense against defamation."
Of course it is, but not only that, but the claim can be false and you can still defend yourself if you can prove that you genuinely believed the claim to be true - for example, if someone else previously sent you the claim in an e-mail, and you then went to check the veracity of the claim and a number of newspapers were also printing the falsehood then you could reasonably argue that you were simply repeating something that you would have absolutely no reason to believe is false.
The biggest problem with the UK's implementation is that it allowed for people outside the UK to bring their quarrel to the UK to be decided. The actual implementation in the UK isn't massively unreasonable. You can only get fucked with a libel/slander suit if you were making false statements about anyone without having put any effort into checking whether they were true or false.
You're arguing that if you make a truthful claim about someone that it's not a defence, but that's wholly false, of course it's a defence. You may have to prove why you think it's truthful though and then it's a question of how truthful it actually is, do you merely think it's truthful when it may not be or can you actually show that it is?
Yep, it's the web tracking that makes this bill awful. If it weren't for that section the bill wouldn't actually be that bad as security bills go because it's largely an improvement on the status quo - i.e. bringing the judiciary into the issuing of warrants for digital searches and interception is a good thing and an acceptable measure IMO. We already allow judges to issue warrants to smash people's doors down and that's typically seen as acceptable, so I have few qualms with a digital equivalent. Our judiciary are typically good on this front and I have far more trust in them than I do the Home Secretary. The other stuff about banning VPNs and encryption was, as I suspected, bullshit, and the bill says nothing about these things contrary to claims in the summary.
But the web tracking needs to be stopped, Theresa May has completely understated the implications of what she's proposing claiming it's just like an itemised phone bill. It's not. An itemised phone bill at best tells people who you've called. A list of domains you've visited can tell people everything from your sexuality, to where you shop, to where you bank, to where you plan to go on holiday, to where you work, to who your service providers are, whether you're having or seeking to have an affair (e.g. Ashley Madison), where you get your news from, and so on. As I understand it, the security services weren't too bothered about this power (presumably because they're already intercepting way more than this), and it was actually the police that pushed for this particular measure and yet it's the police I trust with access to this data the least because the police have the lowest barriers to entry, the largest staff count, and the greatest interaction with the public that they can now spy on and so are the most likely to abuse it.
It's this argument I'll be making to my MP but I don't hold up much hope for this being blocked given that unsurprisingly Labour backs it in part because one of the biggest slimeballs in partliament, Andy Burnham backs it, and Corbyn still seems to be unable to find anything even slightly representing a spine when he now needs it the most since he's, you know, supposed to be some kind of leader now. Mass use of VPNs by the public will be the only realistic option to fight this.
"You got a precedent to back that up?"
I don't need a precedent, because it's not something that's affected by precedent - another legal misunderstanding on your part.
The fact is you simply don't know what argument Snowden will make in court, you don't know what fumbles the prosecution might make that could nullify their case, you don't know what instruments Snowden's lawyer maybe able to use including appeals to conflicting or higher law (i.e. perhaps a clause in the constitution) and you don't know what loopholes a great lawyer maybe able to find. You don't know these things because the trial hasn't happened, and because you're blatantly not a lawyer.
Yet despite this, you're still claiming the outcome is predetermined, and the only way to ever be sure of that is if there was no opportunity for a fair trial in the first place. Again, I'll make it abundantly clear - in a fair trial there can be absolutely no pre-supposition about the outcome.
The case against Oscar Pistorius for murder was pretty cut and dried too, but it turns out that if you fire a gun through a door at someone you couldn't possibly know that you might kill them. The fact is that judicial systems can throw up some pretty nonsensical claims that create conditions for outcomes that we would never expect and to hence pre-judge the outcome of a trial and suggest it's just a formality is incredibly naive and stupid. It's that idiocy you're displaying that highlights how little you know, and how naive you are when it comes to legal matters, and it's for that reason that you should probably just stop digging.
"Pot meet kettle."
Well at least you admit you've no idea what you're talking about if nothing else, even if you falsely imply I have no idea to. The difference is I'm not the one pretending to know things that I don't, whereas you're making claims about things you couldn't possibly know. You're allowing your political bias to interfere with your attempt at arguing that facts, and it's causing you to fail hard at achieving anything - you're not achieving your political aims of getting people to agree that we should just fuck justice and lynch Snowden because you're using an argument that's intellectually bankrupt and trivial for anyone with even the most basic understanding of law and justice to see right through.
Of course it's about mass surveillance, if it was about individual surveillance then they'd just get a warrant to MITM or similar a particular suspects PC exactly like they always have with physical mail and phone calls. They already have the powers to do that type of attack to get a target of a warrant.
They might argue that it's about retaining data so if they come back to someone they can investigate their communications retroactively, but that doesn't explain why they aren't getting all phone calls logged, and all physical mail photocopied and stored. They already can't get historical data of other communication mediums so there's no reason to think they suddenly need it for investigations using digital communications.
So the only thing this possibly can be about is mass surveillance given that they have all the tools they need for individual surveillance already.
Please don't ever try and be a lawyer, your understanding of the law, and your insistence that you know it when you simply have no idea what path Snowden's lawyers would take is painful to watch.
You still don't even grasp the basic concepts of trials, let alone have any idea whatsoever what legal routes Snowden's lawyers could take.
You're just an internet commentator commenting way above your knowledge and intelligence level on the topic. It's embarrassing.
"Nobody (except me) has presented any reason why the ECHR should intervene that actually uses legal terms correctly."
The ECourtHR is not something that intervenes unless it receives a case. If Snowden moved to a European country, that country decided to extradite him, and he filed an appeal to the ECHR then the ECHR is duty bound to consider hearing that appeal, which it would do if it genuinely thought there was a chance of maltreatment. Something it has determined in a number of US extradition cases FWIW - in large part because the US prison system is deemed to be a fucking joke with no effort whatsoever put into rehabilitation or support given for vulnerable prisoners to sort them the fuck out rather than for them to face a high risk of suicide and being killed - the ECHR recognises that sending people to their death is just fucking wrong. That for what it's worth, is in itself grounds to deny US extradition - no one can be extradited from Europe to the US if there's a substantial risk of the death penalty being imposed. Should the ECHR determine trumps threat to kill Snowden coupled with Snowden's presidential bid to be a subsequent possibility, then that in itself would be enough to deny extradition to the US.
"a Fair Trial for Ed Snowden always results in a conviction"
You still completely lack any comprehension of what a fair trial is. A fair trial pre-supposes absolutely nothing. It doesn't matter what he has said out of court - it could just as well be that he's being pressured by the Russians and the Chinese for all you know, and court would be the place for him to open up about that. Maybe his wife leaked the fucking documents and is taking the rap. You don't know. I'm not claiming for one moment that that's the case, but precisely because that sort of thing can be the case is why court cases are started with no presupposition of guilt, yet that's exactly what you're saying they should do, they should be unfair trials, based on hearsay. That's not a court, that's a fucking witch hunt.
The fact you don't understand that shows an insane lack of comprehension about the legal process by you, and so I don't even know why you'd feel remotely qualified to make a post on such a topic. You don't even understand how courts work at the most basic level.
"Who said anything about want?"
I said want because I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt - there's two possibilities here, the first is that you're a flagrant retard, hence why you don't even have a primary school level understanding of justice, the second is that you're just an anti-Snowden zealot who is trying to justify somehow why he should go straight to punishment.
If you want I can play your game, and accept that yes, you've not openly admitted that's your view, I can pretend you're a flagrant retard instead if that's preferable, but most mature people have the courage of their convictions to admit what they actually want. I don't know, maybe you are just as clueless about justice and Western courts as you're pretending? Maybe you do have a pre-school level of knowledge on the subject? I'd like to think that's not the case and you're just playing dumb for politics though and you're too cowardly to say what you really mean - that you want to see Snowden punished.
"If you want to change the subject to the ECHR you can do that, but you'll have to explain why the ECHR would apply."
Well that's already been done, but you seem unable to stick to the thread of discussion. I should you step right back to the beginning and start again, because you're arguing that I can't bring something up, that is relevant to the actual thread of discussion based on the summary. Believe it or not, discussions on forums can arch from the strict bounds of the original summary.
"A fair trial is a trial where the defendant has the right to properly respond to the evidence. If said evidence is truly overwhelming, the tiral is basically a formality. Just ask Lars Ulbricht."
No, that's not a fair trial, that's a kangaroo court. A fair trial is where no assumptions are made before hand, yet you're arguing that the trial is largely irrelevant (a formality). That by definition is not a fair trial, if the trial is a formality then it's anything but a fair trial because you're implying the decision is already made. You apparently don't even have a basic grasp of what justice is, and it's probably not surprising therefore that you're arguing that Snowden should jump into a situation where there's a fair chance he wont get it.
I can only assume therefore that you're either astoundingly ignorant, or you're trying to justify why Snowden should get fucked because that's politically what you want - in other words you're a rabid wingnut that wants not a fair trial, but exactly the opposite. Sorry, I have no time for that kind of retardation, there's enough of that in places like North Korea, China, and Russia without making it more commonplace in the West as well.
They don't seem to have much of a problem on consoles where it works fine.
No idea why they're struggling so hard with the PC version.
"And how is the European Convention on Human Rights related to a non-binding resolution passed by a body which does not have the legal authority to make a binding resolution in the first place?"
I'm not sure you know how such conventions work. European conventions are imposed on member states as things that must be implemented. Each member state has a legal implementation that is binding, and that can be ruled upon by the European Court of Human Rights (they can also rule whether the implementation meets the standards of the legally bound to implement convention).
"He's accused of leaking classified information. He did it. He's admitted as much in several public interviews. There is no leaker's defense in the US."
None of which has any relevance as to whether he'd get a fair trial. I'm not sure you really get how this whole justice thing works - hint: judgements are not decided upon what did or didn't happen in the spotlight of the media, only what happens in the court room.
"The absolute last person in the world who wants a fair trial is Ed Snowden, because a fair trial results in a conviction. The absolute last people in the world who want to unfairly try Ed Snowden are the US Government, because the only way for them to lose a case like this is unfairly try it."
Yep, and that's why Guantanamo detainees were treated so fairly over the yea... oh wait, no, they weren't. It's a bit of a stretch to pretend the US circa 1971 is the same as the UK circa 2015. The last 15 years has provide a plethora of evidence that the quality of the US justice system has seen a profound slide away from fairness.
"And again, this isn't the ECHR that's ruled. I doubt it could rule, seeing as he's not in Europe. It probably needs him to be there, and a US request for extradition,l before it can consider the issues."
I know people on Slashdot don't read the article, but you could at least read the summary and follow the thread, where we're speculating about how well protected he'd be if he moved to a European nation which was basically the entire point of my post.
There are a number of issues with the US justice system that act as barriers for extradition and that a number of requested extraditions to the US have been denied on. The two issues are:
- The US has a terrible modern track record on justice relating to national security cases both because of Guantanamo bay, and the way other whistleblowers such as Manning were treated. Typically this sort of thing can be dealt with with legal guarantees to the extraditing nation, but I believe the US has reneged on some of these agreements in the past, especially regarding Guantanamo, and so this means such legal guarantees from the US about treatment of prisoners no longer hold much weight.
- The US prison system is fundamentally broken, both in terms of failing to rehabilitate, general treatment in jail (i.e. high rates of assault including sexual assault) and in terms of an extraordinarily high incarceration rate.
I agree with you though, I'm not suggesting Snowden would be disappeared, but the standards required to extradite someone like this where there is a high risk of political prejudice impacting things just aren't being well met by the US.
If Snowden was extradited now, but one of the Republican wing nuts rather than a moderate got the presidency next year like Trump then do you really think Snowden would be completely free from the risk of not getting a fair trial? Do you believe that someone like Trump wouldn't try and get him in front of a military court when Trump has even suggested Snowden should be killed?
Now I don't think Snowden's life would necessarily be at risk, but I could quite imagine him being given a trial in front of a kangaroo court, especially if someone like Trump were to win the presidency, and that's the sort of thing that the ECHR has to consider - not just the situation now, but what the risks are if the situation changes because of change of leader, and sadly, right now, Trump is not the most likely candidate, but certainly not completely implausible either.
No he's right, it was a political union designed to bind Europe together to make another war unthinkable. NATO was designed to stop Russia (well, the USSR at the time) marching into Europe to undo all of that which is exactly as Russia is trying to do again now with it's invasion into Ukraine and it's funding of far right europhobic political groups like France's FN, the UK's UKIP, and Greece's Golden Dawn whose main policies are to pull their respective countries out of the EU, hence weakening the EU and opening the door further for Russian intrusion.
Both were certainly primarily created to keep Europe from war, although NATO also protects the likes of Canada's northern borders and Alaska too of course.
Not one extradition treaty in an EU member state overrules the European Convention on Human Rights which all EU member states are signatories to and members of.
The lack of the US' ability to guarantee Snowden will be granted a fair trial, means that any extradition treaty will be irrelevant in the face of a European Court of Human Rights challenge using the European Convention on Human Rights and it's implementations.
This is precisely why the convention and court exist - to prevent any member state treating someone unfairly in violation of their fundamental rights by acting as a higher power that can determine if a member government is treating people within it's borders fairly or not. It's a fine example of the importance of it all, it's one entity that can tell governments it doesn't give a shit how much they wish to kowtow to the US, fundamental human rights come first.
Of course a nation state could break protocol and ignore an ECHR ruling, but then it also doesn't get to dictate to places like China, Russia, and so forth about human rights anymore, because it would then be hypocritical and meaningless to do so.
"Internet regulation is only needed when there's a monopoly."
Nonsense, companies are equally capable of acting in concert with each other to price fix. The big 6 energy companies in the UK are a prime example of this.
Competition isn't much use if businesses just work together to agree not to compete on certain things because they know there's more profit for all of them in them acting as a cartel, than there is in competing with each other.
"because frankly, what private citizen will need a lot of international calls, Europeans don't move routinely halfway across the continent other than US-Americans"
Speak for yourself. My wife goes to Brussels for work fairly frequently, but doesn't have a work phone (she doesn't really need one, or want one) so it's nice that she can still phone home or text home without any additional cost when this comes into effect.
Similarly we have a wedding in France next year, and we regularly go on weekend trips to the continent. The fact this law includes phone calls, text, and data, is fantastic. The fact I'll be able to use Google maps for GPS anywhere in Europe now without facing an extortionate data bill is an amazing change. I no longer have to turn my smartphone into a dumb phone by disabling data every time I step on a fucking plane or boat.
I doubt this will increase costs at home, because frankly there is enough competition to ensure that wont happen. It'll also incentivise networks across Europe to enter into each national market, and hence increase competition further.
Yes, I'm pissed off about the weak net neutrality protections too. But the roaming change is a massively beneficial incredibly pro-consumer move, to paint it otherwise is frankly retarded.
"winning is all there is. Those are the players you have to deal with and while they typically are cowards, they can go off much like a explosive, if they are triggered by an excess of frustration. Would they hunt and stalk the female speakers, if those speakers we seen as victims by the psychopaths, most definitely."
I don't think it's really got anything to do with victimhood, or sex or anything like that as I've seen the exact same behaviour on forums, and even here on Slashdot.
Many years ago I made a post about Iran's nuclear programme and the IAEA's opinion on it in response to someone here on Slashdot - they were making claims that were verifiably false (I posted the IAEA reports to show what the IAEA actually claimed, rather than what the posted was claiming they claimed). I believe this was back in about 2008 or so. The argument was something like "The US is in the wrong because even the IAEA says Iran isn't seeking nuclear weapons!" but the IAEA reports didn't say that - the IAEA reports said they didn't know if they were or weren't because Iran had blocked them from obtaining the necessary information to verify that they weren't. I pointed out that that's not quite the same thing, that the suggestion that IAEA had absolved Iran was false, that it had merely said it couldn't confirm either way. My argument wasn't really anything other than that - a correct of what the IAEA said, by simply quoting and linking to what the IAEA had said.
A couple of months ago I made a post on a completely unrelated topic, a light hearted joking comment about people on Slashdot never being wrong. So imagine my surprise when looking at my comment history to see replies, to notice this comment that had been made two weeks prior having a reply to it suddenly. The creepy bit? The reply was dredging up the point I'd made in this discussion from at least 5 years ago about Iran's nuclear programme seemingly implying he was still right. Clearly the poster in question similarly has the same kind of psychopathic tendencies you refer to to hold a grudge for all this time over being proven wrong by actual citations of 1st hand sources, and over what? a largely meaningless debate on Slashdot from many years ago. Frankly when I saw the post it took me a while to even remember the original discussion, and I was trying to think what recent discussion he'd been referring to. It's only after a while that I realised he was dragging something up from so very long ago - it's a topic I don't really give much of a shit about nowadays because it's largely resolved which is why at first I couldn't fathom what he was talking about given the lack of discussion on that topic here for a long time.
Personally it doesn't really bother me that someone has been holding this grudge against me all that time, that's really their problem to deal with not mine, and honestly being stalked by a nerd raged basement dweller is probably about the least scary (and frankly most amusing) thing I can think of - I see those poorly socialised nerd rage types on my morning commute as they fight each other to be first off the train with their worn Halo 3 collectors edition backpacks and so forth. But the point I'm making is that I don't think it's got anything to do with type of game, or whether you're male or female - it seems that psychopaths can exist in any environment, and if there is even the slightest most meaningless bit of competition (e.g. something as trivial as an online debate) then that's enough for them to pursue their perceived opponent over an extended period whether their target is scared of them or not, whether the target is male or female or not.
It's almost like a kind of severe nerd rage, but whilst most people get over their anger, these people just can't - it never goes away, it sticks with them, and they let it eat away at them indefinitely. I think you're right that these people are the ones that cheat in online games, and I suspect this is why - to them that anger must be avenged by any means necessary, there must be no l
Yeah but as a Brit I fully support the idea :)
America, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, half of Africa, most of China, most of the Middle East time to come back to daddy.
At least then we'll be big enough to bully Russia into giving Crimea back to Ukraine!
Yeah, the GP's conspiracy theory is rather comical when you consider that if anyone is supporting ISIS it's Russia by bombing pretty much only the rebels who have been fighting ISIS.
There's no mistake, Russia's actions in Syria bolster ISIS by hitting it's opponents, the fact this is a side effect of supporting the Syrian regime is neither here nor there. The effect is the same - Russian action is massively beneficial to ISIS as it's both barely targeted at them, and pushes previously moderates into their ranks.
A more logical step is to get a very fucking large, sharp, hooked anchor on a long run of chain, and drag it perpendicular to the direction of the cable until you either drag it up and can break the thing that way, or just cut through it with the sheer weight and sharpness of the anchor.
"Thing is, the US never stopped placing military assets near Russia. In the 90s Russian stopped its air patrols and cut back sea patrols due to lack of money, but the US didn't. The US has a lot of military bases near Russia too, which is has kept open."
It's also closed a lot too. The US trajectory was pretty clearly in the direction Russia wanted. You may have forgotten that the US wanted to build a missile shield in Europe because of the fear that Iran was building nuclear ICBMs and Russia was refusing to stop Iran doing this by joining necessary sanctions. America ultimately cancelled the project to appease Russian fears it was targetted at them, and only many years later did Russia agree separately to help deal with the Iran nuclear threat.
The amount of American deployments in Europe was shrinking at a rapid pace right into the run up of the Ukraine crisis. In fact, I believe at the point the Ukraine crisis started there were no American MBTs left in Europe - this despite the fact that Russia had invaded a NATO ally and EU candidate, Georgia.
There was good reason for the US de-escalation towards Russia too - the US simply stopped caring about Russia being bothered instead by China and the Middle East. Even the US with it's military might has finite resources and it couldn't justify stationing equipment on Russia's border when it was bothered about increasing Chinese, Iranian (and before it's collapse, Syrian) adventurism. US forces had all been re-deployed to the Indian Ocean and Pacific to counter those concerns.
So what you say is almost entirely another Russian propaganda myth. See here for the type and scale of American draw down post-cold war we're talking about:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There was actually a serious push to bring Russia into NATO to seal the deal in terms of ending the cold war in the 90s, this ended when Putin rose to power and made it clear he wants to resurrect the USSR as an independent power. The last remnants of this plan were finally obliterated when Putin invaded Ukraine and the NATO-Russia cooperation agreements (that saw Russian military leaders staffed at NATO HQ) we're finally torn up.
So no, you can't blame military build up against Russia I'm afraid either. Russia is the only country that's actually been aggressive on that front with invasions of Georgia and Ukraine and Russia's unilateral decision to ignore a number of nuclear disarmament treaties (including that which promised Ukraine security in return for giving up it's nuclear arsenal). America had all but pulled out of Europe when Putin invaded Ukraine.
Really, the more the US has pulled out, the more Russia has pushed forward. Any US military expansionism in Europe is wholly the result of increased Russian aggression rather than vice versa.
There's literally no evidence that Russian aggression has increased in response to increase US military expansionism in Europe, only the complete contrary. The best part is all this information is public, so go see for yourself how much the US has drawn down it's forces in Europe since the end of the cold war.
Yep, the issues you raise regarding your Senate mirror the issues we have in the UK's House of Lords which is our equivalent. It sounds like Canada inherited all the worst ideas in our political system here in the UK that we too are stuck with and desperately need rid of :)
There's something like 816 peers in our House of Lords now and only 650 elected MPs. The last government was a coalition of the Liberal Democrats (centre left) and the Conservatives (centre right, with a roughly 20% - 30% hard right fringe to it). The Liberal Democrats wanted reform of the Lords, but the hard right in the Conservative despite being a vocal minority got their way as usual because their leader, our PM David Cameron is scared to death of them for whatever reason.
This makes the status quo even worse for us in some ways, because not only does a party with 38% of the vote have 100% of the power, but that 20% - 30% fringe of the Conservatives that are hard right have way more power than they're warranted.
"If we at least had a useful Senate then there might be some hope but seeing as they are all just appointed and would rather not rock the boat while getting their nice paychecks, what the PM wants the PM pretty much gets."
To be fair, this is a symptom of the first past the post system more than anything. Canada has been largely blessed over the years with a combination of fairly competent governments, or minority rule. It's only the last few years it's suffered from a bad majority that the problems of FPTP have come to the fore.
Here in the UK FPTP has long been a problem because we've constantly faced the exact problems you describe. The last parliament was the first coalition in about 60 years, but also a reasonably moderate government as a result. Unfortunately, we're still stuck with it though because one thing it didn't achieve was electoral reform (a stiched up vote for a new voting system that only had a bad choice rather than the choices people actually wanted, and Conservatives breaking their promise to reform the Lords).
So be glad at least that this is something Trudeau has promised to deal with, and make sure above all else that you hold him to that promise. If you can get him to move you to a more proportional system then you'll be in much better shape to avoid those issues. This is why Germany has a fairly decent parliament that's fairly successful and accountable to and representative of it's citizens - it's more proportional system means that parties are forced to compromise more and provide solutions that are at least somewhat acceptable to the majority, rather than unacceptable to the majority which is all too often the case under FPTP - for example, the current government in the UK got 38% of the vote, so 62% of the electorate voted against them, and yet that government will be forcing through laws regardless of what that 62% majority want. That's not really democracy.
So be careful not to take your eye off the real problem - your broken electoral system that's a copy of our broken electoral system. Make sure that if nothing else that that gets changed and then at least you only have 4 years until you can have a more representative form of governance. Achieve that and majorities will rarely be an issue - your subsequent governments will have to be more reasonable, more open to compromise, and more representative of the electorate.