The problem is, they're right. This isn't a Muslim issue, not really. If you look at the history of the region, the exact same problems that run rampant today have been around for thousands of years, long predating Islam. All Mohamed really did was codify a toxic culture, and it's those underlying, endemic cultural issues that need to be worked out before they can be safely admitted to the community of the rest of the civilized world.
And of course that would totally work, because the presence of a proper civilized market drives out black markets all the time, in all sorts of goods and services...
It's not such a bad comparison. I don't remember off the top of my head where I saw this, but just recently they did a poll and the people of Saudi Arabia overwhelmingly support what ISIS is doing. Something like 75-80% approval, according to this poll at least.
The whole country is a mess from beginning to end, starting with the name. Imagine if a group of rabid fundamentalists led by a guy named Jones got together an army and took over Texas, and decided to rename it "Jones's Texas", and because they held all the oil fields everyone decided to just play along and not provoke them, and you'd have a situation exactly analogous to what a vicious barbarian warlord by the name of Saud did in a land that used to be known simply as "Arabia."
The Bin Laden family are Saudi oil billionaires. Saudi Arabia funded the 9/11 bombers, and the people rejoiced in the streets when the attacks went off. When are we going to finally admit the simple truth that they are not our friends?
It's not just the one country, either. ISTM the best thing to do, which would be a lot simpler if it wasn't for oil, would be to build a big wall around the entire Middle East. Turn the entire place into one big quarantine zone and check in once every hundred years or so to see if they've either 1) all killed each other off yet or 2) somehow managed to work out their differences and develop to a point at which they're ready to join the civilized world. But frankly, my bet would be on outcome #3: neither 1 nor 2 ever happens.
Alas, there's oil there and we still care about that, so that's not likely to ever actually happen.
The point I was making, which everyone seems to have missed or ignored, is that in the vast majority of cases the prostitute is the victim of vicious, predatory people and is "working" against her will, and that this has nothing to do with the state of the law regarding prostitution. (ie. it's not the law victimizing them.)
This seems like a rather important point: the people who put together the Snooper's Charter for spying on the internet don't seem to understand the first thing about how the internet actually works. And yet we're supposed to give them sweeping powers to spy on it? How does that make any sense?
I'm reminded of one of the more thought-provoking passages from Brandon Sanderson's epic, The Way of Kings:
I walked from Abamabar to Urithiru. In this, the metaphor and experience are one, inseparable to me like my mind and memory. One contains the other, and though I can explain one to you, the other is only for me.
I strode this insightful distance on my own, and forbade attendants. I had no steed beyond my well-worn sandals, no companion beside a stout staff to offer conversation with its beats against the stone. My mouth was to be my purse; I stuffed it not with gems, but with song. When singing for sustenance failed me, my arms worked well for cleaning a floor or hog pen, and often earned me a satisfactory reward.
Those dear to me took fright for my safety and, perhaps, my sanity. Kings, they explained, do not walk like beggars for hundreds of miles. My response was that if a beggar could manage the feat, then why not a king? Did they think me less capable than a beggar?
Sometimes I think that I am. The beggar knows much that the king can only guess. And yet who draws up the codes for begging ordinances? Often I wonder what my experience in life—my easy life following the Desolation, and my current level of comfort—has given me of any true experience to use in making laws. If we had to rely on what we knew, kings would only be of use in creating laws regarding the proper heating of tea and cushioning of thrones.
It's the law that makes the *prostitute* the victim.
Yup, it's the law. It has nothing to do with kidnapping, human trafficking, blackmail, paying down "debts" related to illegal immigration, or needing a way--any way--to support a drug habit; all of those women are just ordinary citizens trying to make an honest living degrading themselves of their own free will and choice. And they would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for those pesky legislators and their laws!
However, these major summits generally turn into a clusterf--k, with the more militant "protesters" egged on by the anarchist types and the anti-business yahoos coming together to turn it rapidly into throwing rocks, attacking police, trying to access the secure zone of the summit, and so on.
People have been talking about that for years, but there's precious little evidence that it's ever actually happened. Even the infamous 1999 WTO protest "riots" in Seattle were about the most peaceful riots you ever saw, with no deaths or serious injuries caused by the protesters. (Compare contemporary, local media coverage with stories told about the protests later on and in other parts of the country; it's an eye-opening experience.)
Stories about "anti-business yahoos throwing rocks and attacking police" (and throwing Molotov cocktails and using water balloons or squirt guns loaded with acid or bleach) tend to get passed around a lot to create a climate of fear and de-legitimize the protesters, (and to provide an excuse for police to disrupt and suppress them,) but for all that there's no evidence of it actually happening... because it doesn't.
In the late 50's/early 60's young people were in short supply (birthrate was low during the war). This increased their power within society and enabled the era of student protest to begin.
Maybe they're planning a mega-merger with Microsoft, a company that's famous for creating a window-based graphical OS called Windows and a word processor called Word.
First, if Google can detect which links in an email may be hazardous, why not just unlink or censor those particular links?
Come on, you already know the answer to this: because they have no way of magically detecting "this link is harmful" with perfect accuracy. But if they find a link that does match a known-harmful site, it's very reasonable to assume as a heuristic, even if said heuristic is not always correct, that other links in the email may well point to sites that are harmful even if Google does not know that they are harmful.
Having said that,
And, in this case, the "link" in question didn't even exist. Google should be able to detect that and realize that no, we're not sending our readers to their doom.
Precisely. If you have any thoughts at all about possibly voting for her, please read the book Clinton Cash first. If any of the stuff in there is true--not even all of it, but any of it--she and Bill belong in prison, quite possibly for treason, and not on the campaign trail.
It actually reminds me of the Republican contest last time around. Mitt Romney was the clear favorite, but the Republican establishment couldn't stand him, and they did everything they could to throw one candidate after another against him. But despite their best efforts, people kept voting for him, and he won the nomination. (And then proceeded to lose the Presidential vote.)
This time around, it's similar but different on the Democratic side. The clear favorite of actual people is Bernie Sanders, but the party is doing everything they can to push Hillary instead. It appears that they've learned from the Republicans' mistakes, though: they've done everything they can to keep the playing field as un-cluttered as possible. (See also: Larry Lessig.) But despite all this, and despite Hillary's big-money backing, Sanders's poll numbers continue to grow. I guess we'll just have to see how it plays out.
Agreed. This really looks more like a token gesture to generate goodwill than an actual move to stem abuse. (The YouTube equivalent of Fiber To The Press Release, perhaps.)
If they wanted to actually fix a real problem, they'd throw out ContentID.
There's actually a tried-and-true method of shutting down a major terrorist group. Unfortunately we'll never use it on Islamic terrorists because the politica implications are unpalatable to a lot of decision makers. (For the wrong reasons; it would actually be in our national interest to do this even if it had nothing to do with terror either way.)
First, context. Who all remembers The Troubles? It was the name given, with stereotypical British understatement, to a decades-long terror campaign in Ireland and the, well, trouble that arose from it. Like al-Qaeda and ISIS, the Irish terrorists claimed religious motivation for their reprehensible acts.
Unlike al-Qaeda and ISIS, the Irish terrorists are basically no longer a thing.
It's not like British authorities didn't try really hard to wipe them out. They tried every trick in the book--the same book, by and large, that we're employing against Islamic terror--including police action, military action, and signing truces with the terrorists. (Which, terrorists being terrorists, generally ended up not being worth the paper they were printed on. But in the end, it was Amercans who put a stop to The Troubles, and not even by something they did, so much as something they stopped doing.
The USA is home to a significant Irish immigrant population, many of whom live in New York or nearby states, and it was not uncommon for many of them to send support to Irish terrorists out of a misplaced sense of kinship. (It looks a lot less ugly when all the ugly stuff is going on literally half a world away.) But 9/11 changed everything: suddenly it was very unacceptable to support terrorism!
That source of funding dried up almost overnight, and The Troubles came to an abrupt halt without the terrorists' principal source of funding.
So, applying the lesson learned here, how do we shut down Islamic terror?
It's a bit of an elephant in the room, an ugly truth that no one wants to acknowledge, that a significant amount of funding for them comes from legitimate oil revenues, and one of their patrons' largest customers, if not the largest, is the USA.
If we were serious about fighting terror, we would divert some. serious money from the military budget to fund research and development of electric cars, Hyperloops, and renewable energy, and export the technology worldwide, doing everything we can to make petroleum fuel obsolete.
But just try getting the turkeys in DC to sign off on that plan...
When I lived in Washington, I went to a Chipotle once. I found it to be very, very similar to the less-famous Qdoba, but with one significant difference: Chipotle is a victim of "Mexican restaurant disease." If you haven't heard of it, this is a mental condition known to frequently affect people who run Mexican restaurants, which causes them to think everything should be extremely hot (as in spicy, not temperature) and to treat picante as an acceptable substitute for flavor. Qdoba did not have that problem.
I didn't go back. With this E. Coli outbreak, I'm glad I didn't.
I'm not trying to cherry-pick anything. His assertion was that prior to Perry's arrival with his gunboats, (in 1854,) the Japanese (implied: universally, throughout their history) despised guns and thought they were dishonorable. This is clearly not true, as Musashi lived approximately 200 years before Perry.
Note that I'm not making any claims here about who the good guys and the bad guys are; only that that determination is completely irrelevant to the mathematics of encryption.
Bows, guns, spears and halberds are all tools of the warriors and each should be a way to master strategy.
...
From inside fortifications, the gun has no equal among weapons. It is the supreme weapon on the field before the ranks clash, but once swords are crossed the gun becomes inadequate. -- The Book of Five Rings, Miyamoto Musashi (one of the greatest samurai of all time)
On the post: Saudi Arabia Says It Will Sue Twitter Users Who Compare It To ISIS; Apparently Skips The NY Times
Re: Re:
On the post: L.A. Politician Proposes Bold Plan To Wreck Homes, Destroy Lives And Abuse License Plate Reader Technology
Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Saudi Arabia Says It Will Sue Twitter Users Who Compare It To ISIS; Apparently Skips The NY Times
The whole country is a mess from beginning to end, starting with the name. Imagine if a group of rabid fundamentalists led by a guy named Jones got together an army and took over Texas, and decided to rename it "Jones's Texas", and because they held all the oil fields everyone decided to just play along and not provoke them, and you'd have a situation exactly analogous to what a vicious barbarian warlord by the name of Saud did in a land that used to be known simply as "Arabia."
The Bin Laden family are Saudi oil billionaires. Saudi Arabia funded the 9/11 bombers, and the people rejoiced in the streets when the attacks went off. When are we going to finally admit the simple truth that they are not our friends?
It's not just the one country, either. ISTM the best thing to do, which would be a lot simpler if it wasn't for oil, would be to build a big wall around the entire Middle East. Turn the entire place into one big quarantine zone and check in once every hundred years or so to see if they've either 1) all killed each other off yet or 2) somehow managed to work out their differences and develop to a point at which they're ready to join the civilized world. But frankly, my bet would be on outcome #3: neither 1 nor 2 ever happens.
Alas, there's oil there and we still care about that, so that's not likely to ever actually happen.
On the post: L.A. Politician Proposes Bold Plan To Wreck Homes, Destroy Lives And Abuse License Plate Reader Technology
Re: Re: Re:
On the post: UK ISP Boss Highlights Technical Stupidity Of The Snooper's Charter Proposal
I'm reminded of one of the more thought-provoking passages from Brandon Sanderson's epic, The Way of Kings:
On the post: L.A. Politician Proposes Bold Plan To Wreck Homes, Destroy Lives And Abuse License Plate Reader Technology
Re:
Yup, it's the law. It has nothing to do with kidnapping, human trafficking, blackmail, paying down "debts" related to illegal immigration, or needing a way--any way--to support a drug habit; all of those women are just ordinary citizens trying to make an honest living degrading themselves of their own free will and choice. And they would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for those pesky legislators and their laws!
On the post: French Government Using State Of Emergency As An Excuse To Round Up Climate Change Activists
Re:
People have been talking about that for years, but there's precious little evidence that it's ever actually happened. Even the infamous 1999 WTO protest "riots" in Seattle were about the most peaceful riots you ever saw, with no deaths or serious injuries caused by the protesters. (Compare contemporary, local media coverage with stories told about the protests later on and in other parts of the country; it's an eye-opening experience.)
Stories about "anti-business yahoos throwing rocks and attacking police" (and throwing Molotov cocktails and using water balloons or squirt guns loaded with acid or bleach) tend to get passed around a lot to create a climate of fear and de-legitimize the protesters, (and to provide an excuse for police to disrupt and suppress them,) but for all that there's no evidence of it actually happening... because it doesn't.
On the post: The Anonymous Assault On ISIS Is Hurting More Than It's Helping
Re: Re: Causes of Daesh recruitment
Say what now?
On the post: The Anonymous Assault On ISIS Is Hurting More Than It's Helping
Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Chinese Company Learns From The West: Builds Up Big Patent Portfolio, Uses It To Sue Apple In China
Re: Well said
Live by the suit, die by the suit!
On the post: Comcast Tests Net Neutrality By Letting Its Own Streaming Service Bypass Usage Caps
Re: A streaming service named "Stream"!
On the post: Gmail Takes A Sledgehammer To The Techdirt Daily Newsletter When Not Even A Scalpel Is Needed
Come on, you already know the answer to this: because they have no way of magically detecting "this link is harmful" with perfect accuracy. But if they find a link that does match a known-harmful site, it's very reasonable to assume as a heuristic, even if said heuristic is not always correct, that other links in the email may well point to sites that are harmful even if Google does not know that they are harmful.
Having said that,
...yeah, that's kind of silly.
On the post: Hillary Clinton Joins The 'Make Silicon Valley Break Encryption' Bandwagon
Re:
On the post: Hillary Clinton Joins The 'Make Silicon Valley Break Encryption' Bandwagon
Re: does anyone else have much of a chance?
This time around, it's similar but different on the Democratic side. The clear favorite of actual people is Bernie Sanders, but the party is doing everything they can to push Hillary instead. It appears that they've learned from the Republicans' mistakes, though: they've done everything they can to keep the playing field as un-cluttered as possible. (See also: Larry Lessig.) But despite all this, and despite Hillary's big-money backing, Sanders's poll numbers continue to grow. I guess we'll just have to see how it plays out.
I do agree that there doesn't appear to be anyone particularly noteworthy on the Republican side this time around. The strongest candidate (still!) appears to be Donald Trump, and that's kind of worrisome, because as I've noted before, it's highly likely that the next President will be whoever the Republican candidate ends up being.
On the post: YouTube Puts Some Monetary Weight Behind Fighting For Fair Use: Others Should Too
Re:
If they wanted to actually fix a real problem, they'd throw out ContentID.
On the post: Dumb Idea... Or The Dumbest Idea? Seize Terrorists' Copyrights And Then Censor Them With The DMCA
How to actually succeed at stopping terrorism
First, context. Who all remembers The Troubles? It was the name given, with stereotypical British understatement, to a decades-long terror campaign in Ireland and the, well, trouble that arose from it. Like al-Qaeda and ISIS, the Irish terrorists claimed religious motivation for their reprehensible acts.
Unlike al-Qaeda and ISIS, the Irish terrorists are basically no longer a thing.
It's not like British authorities didn't try really hard to wipe them out. They tried every trick in the book--the same book, by and large, that we're employing against Islamic terror--including police action, military action, and signing truces with the terrorists. (Which, terrorists being terrorists, generally ended up not being worth the paper they were printed on. But in the end, it was Amercans who put a stop to The Troubles, and not even by something they did, so much as something they stopped doing.
The USA is home to a significant Irish immigrant population, many of whom live in New York or nearby states, and it was not uncommon for many of them to send support to Irish terrorists out of a misplaced sense of kinship. (It looks a lot less ugly when all the ugly stuff is going on literally half a world away.) But 9/11 changed everything: suddenly it was very unacceptable to support terrorism!
That source of funding dried up almost overnight, and The Troubles came to an abrupt halt without the terrorists' principal source of funding.
So, applying the lesson learned here, how do we shut down Islamic terror?
It's a bit of an elephant in the room, an ugly truth that no one wants to acknowledge, that a significant amount of funding for them comes from legitimate oil revenues, and one of their patrons' largest customers, if not the largest, is the USA.
If we were serious about fighting terror, we would divert some. serious money from the military budget to fund research and development of electric cars, Hyperloops, and renewable energy, and export the technology worldwide, doing everything we can to make petroleum fuel obsolete.
But just try getting the turkeys in DC to sign off on that plan...
On the post: Chipotle Exposes Private Data By Sending HR E-mails Via Unowned Domain, Doesn't See The Problem
I didn't go back. With this E. Coli outbreak, I'm glad I didn't.
On the post: DailyDirt: Does It Take A Village Or A Japanese Metropolis?
Re: Re: Re: The Japanese Don’t Have A Gun Culture
On the post: Hillary Clinton Joins The 'Make Silicon Valley Break Encryption' Bandwagon
Re: Re: Important distinction
On the post: DailyDirt: Does It Take A Village Or A Japanese Metropolis?
Re: The Japanese Don’t Have A Gun Culture
...you were saying?
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