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warmblood

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Welcome, ACLU 9 years ago

I see the ACLU as an organization that isn't blind to all constitutional entitlements, and I don't believe they have any responsibility to be that. I see them as particularly interested in civil rights defense for the powerless against the powerful and untouchable, who are particularly antagonistic at the moment.

Firearms interests have their own highly influential advocacy already from more than one entity, so it puts this argument in the "all lives matter" category of flawed defenses.

There is a large difference in power and knowledge between these two sides, which is the heart of the ethics argument.

The people living on top of the resources may have legally relinquished their rights to it and the intact land it's buried beneath, but the drafters of those contracts have a lot of room and leverage to act in bad faith in order to exploit them. This can prevent these people from escaping a cycle of subjugation because they are given mere subsistence instead of wealth in return for their resources.

Legality of things like this are often just procedural facades to release mineral extraction companies from accusations that they are doing something wrong, harming someone or, sadly, indirectly enslaving vulnerable people.

Having a conservative politic is a choice. That person probably has a lot of intersecting workplace difficulties that go along with being the type of person who wants to police which bathrooms people use.

I would ask you why is this singled out of an article that covers a large range of ideas. Your mask is now off.

To charge the device while using the audio output? That my mother can continue to use her card swipe reader for her small hair salon? I'm not sure what it's like to have an imagination that cannot conceive even one very common use case where this adapter concept falls short.

This dismissiveness is the reason we need influential voices to speak for the user in the design process.

One could say that this engineering degree finally put him into the place where he belonged all these years. It illustrates that there are unfair barriers that prevent people from making themselves and their families happy and healthy. Giving them the resources to succeed and provide for their families is a net good not just for their own selfish interests but for their surrounding economy and society as well.

I think the takeaway should be more about what we can give to the average working class person who is probably more intelligent and motivated than society is willing to give them credit for. What can we do for them instead of grinding them down in undignified, barely productive poverty wage jobs.

There is a deep difference of power and control between the average consumer and a multinational food processing corporation. The argument of the burden being on individual responsibility you are trying to make can only be made if the consumer is not being aggressively misinformed about the limited choices of products available to them for the prices they can afford. The company in question has the resources to make their relationship with the target consumer a very asymmetrical one, and they are always positioned with more information and more leverage.

Surely if you're taking the dry, deterministic outlook on this discussion you'd take this into consideration.

This is terrorism. Given what we all know based on past events about how the FBI conducts their activities, there is no way any reasonably aware citizen can conduct their life normally after such an encounter.

The last discussion thread on this topic had more than a few people complaining that Isis (the given name of the developer in the article) is overreacting and paranoid, which is a saddening response to see. It exposes the privileges and unfortunate circumstances citizens find themselves in because these agencies refuse to prosecute their anti-terror investigations in well-thought out ways, instead pursuing facile leads without regard to the external effects they cause.

We've even seen evidence that these agencies deliberately manipulate otherwise innocent people into behavior that implicates them in their "terror suspect" criteria, so it's hard to believe that anyone in this situation could be somehow too cautious.

I am almost cynical enough to believe that a modern neoliberal president surrounded by hawkish advisors could be convinced quite easily to personally kill the keeper and retrieve the launch codes. I believe that the hawkish "at any cost" mindset of modern American politics distorts human empathy so much that it's completely within the realm of belief for me for this to occur.

More likely, I think, that those holding prestigious enough office can find ways to get around very high procedural barriers like this one by assigning the task to a secret service agent or other on-hand staff of a martial trade.

Personally I think we've seen plenty of evidence that those in high office might personally carry out and enable heinous acts of individual violence if the stakes are made to appear grave enough to them.

Many would say that it's actually designed to milk the pennies from the federal government by proxy of the student and parent with a significant markup.

This is somewhat worse than simply taking from individuals because it implies a systemic breakage that someone is taking advantage of, possibly using political influence to keep that breakage from being fixed.

I'm strongly with you but it's hardly the last bastion of acceptable racism. It's one of very many we still have. Adequate education in any form or at any age, he kind that is crucial for access to college, is flat out unavailable for many people in underserved communities.

To be quite honest, "bad government wasting taxpayer money" is more than newsworthy.

To your other point, we have in the past seen the media reporting these types of things in incomplete ways for fear of irritating their sources and losing reporting access.

I think your own life experiences probably matter a lot with regards to whether some of the white supremacy stuff the bot was repeating is offensive or not a "big deal".

Standing behind the open and casual use of racial slurs isn't advocacy of freedom of speech. It's advocacy of a specific kind of hate speech that is only used when someone intends to vilify and direct hostility towards a marginalized minority.

The inclination to take from people of color at the cost of their own existence and then offer little, if anything, in return is the parallel. This has changed little 250 years later in European and American societies because just as before, people of color have to fight to justify their equal worth and right to exist. It's a partial takeaway from the OP.

Sure, and that's fine if you want to torture the meanings of words that way. I don't have any problem with you doing so.

I have the same contempt for these people as you do but if we always let off-context quotes, righteous as they may feel, go unchalleneged, it's a shame on all of us.

The context of the Mussolini quote was not uttered with a commercial enterprise in mind. Commercial enterprises called "corporations" were not a real thing in Mussolini's world. That's all I have to say here.

Mussolini: '' Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.''

The word "corporatism" in this context is not a very good translation. It's a real quote, but "corporation" in Mussolini's time would be more accurately translated as "guild" or any arbitrary hierarchical group of people with common interests. Corporations as we know them (commercial enterprises) weren't a thing as far as Mussolini knew.

As much as I appreciate the sentiment this quote carries, it's just not applicable to anything today. Snopes thread about this:

message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=36218

Specifically what do you take umbrage with in the case of this bill and the EFF's position?

I'm asking as someone who agrees with your overall point but is mystified about what made you post it here under this article specifically.

Edward Snowden Q&A 13 years ago

I see.

Despite already blowing the whistle and turning unconstitutional domestic surveillance into a public discussion for the first time in, well, ever, to truly be useful to society he must accept your amorphous terms of disclosure for information that is likely forthcoming anyway.

Thank you for explaining yourself.

Edward Snowden Q&A 13 years ago

I don't think anyone reading your comment is sure of what you mean by vague and substantial. He has explicitly addressed every one of his harshest criticisms thus far in much clearer language than most of us are used to seeing in the media.