131–140 of 266 posts
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All pages, one click: http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://www.nytimes.com/2010/...
Have we discussed ViewText here? I'm impressed. I think I may start using this instead of readability.
ihackernews is the best way to view news.yc on a smart phone. And viewtext is incorporated there to ensure that pages are readable.
I've had very good experiences with both. Thanks Ronnie.
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the fact that the government was kicking him out of the military for being gay If that is a fact, is there a source? "An Army spokesman, Lt. Col. Eric Bloom, said Manning, who entered the Army as a private in October 2007, was demoted last month for an assault. He said he was not facing early discharge." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06...
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/us/09manning.html?pagewant... > friends said his social life was defined by the need to conceal his sexuality under “don’t ask, don’t tell”
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The basic problem is that Obama is a cheerleader in support of bigotry and discrimination against minorities. And when the vast majority of Americans are a member of some discriminated-against class, it shouldn't really be that big of a surprise when Americans start attacking America. Until we have equal rights for LGBT, drug users, the chronically ill, the mentally ill, children, students, fetishists, men, women, re…
"Until we have equal rights for {x} then America will never be safe." I'm quite certain you can't argue that "the terrorists" would stop attacking us if only we had equal rights for LGBT in this country. And the fact that 1 guy may or may not have have leaked the documents because he may or may not have felt discriminated against isn't much of a reason to argue FOR equal rights. I'd prefer to argue FOR equal rights o…
This sounds like something that is true, but I'm not sure it actually is. The basic problem is that saying something is morally right is a statement, not an argument. If you read Jon Stewart Mill's essay On Liberty, he doesn't just say that free speech is morally right, but rather he proves it using practical examples.
For example, here is a good quote I found the other day about the political cost of bigotry:
"As important as the issue of bigotry is that this incessant vilification of gun owners precludes reasonable compromise over gun laws. The gun lobby press faithfully reports the philippics, and reprints the most vituperative anti-gun cartoons, to inflame its readers. Why would the gun lobby actually pay royalties to Herblock, Oliphant etc. for their anti-gun cartoons? Because the gun lobby's purposes are best served by convincing gun owners they are a hated minority. There can be no greater incentive for monetary contributions to the gun lobby and fanatic hatred of gun law proposals, no matter how apparently reasonable.
Gun owners are convinced (in part, by bitter experience) that gun laws will be invidiously administered and unfairly enforced; and, just as important, that gun owners are anathema to persons and groups like the ACLU to whom other American can look for help against mistreatment at the hands of the state. So gun owners hysterically oppose controls substantially similar to ones they readily accept for cars and prescription medicines. This is only natural, given the rancor with which controls are advocated and the purposes avowed by their more extreme advocates. Would driver licensing and automobile registration have been adopted if they had been advocated on the basis that having a car is evidence of moral, intellectual or sexual incapacity -- or that the desired end is to progressively increase regulation until cars are unavailable to all but the military and the police? Would not diabetics and others with chronic illness hysterically oppose the prescription system if doctors were under constant pressure from church groups and editorialists denouncing medication as immoral? Do not gay rights activists vehemently oppose policies (however apparently reasonable), they see as motivated by enmity to gays and likely to be administered in that spirit of enmity?
Two clarifications are in order here: 1) I recognize that cars, guns and medicines are different commodities that may require very different policy responses. My point is only that no policy, however rational in the abstract, can succeed if those it regulates see it as motivated by hatred, contempt and denial that they have any legitimate interests to be considered. 2) I also recognize that gun owners respond to anti-gun attacks no less hatefully. But there is a crucial difference: gun owners are not seeking to make their enemies own guns. In contrast, what control advocates do by heaping contempt on gun owners is forever alienate those whose compliance is indispensable if gun laws are to work. However satisfying it may be to anti-gun crusaders to portray gun owners as 'demented and blood-thirsty psychopaths whose concept of fun is to rain death upon innocent creatures both human and otherwise', the result is catastrophically counter-productive to the cause of gun control." -Don Kates
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Oh, and while you're at it, Wikileaks? I'd love to see leaks from Russia, China, UK, Japan etc. You've been picking on the US for far too long; these other countries are no angels either. Are you offering to leak this information? Remember, they do not break into US systems to get this information. They need someone to leak it to them.
Plus, a couple of those countries will wipe Assange and his organization off the face of the earth. Assange is only picking on the US because we're more civil. It's like how the anti-religioun crowd tends to pick on Christianity, instead of one of the actually vicious religions that will kill them. Really, Assange is merely perpetrating a sophisticated form of bullying.
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It's all secret or noforn. If he was working as an analyst, he'd likely be badged for it. It also depends on his particular job responsibilities. My guess is that he was cleared to access a document archive for his day-to-day operations and started grabbing random stuff when he figured out a way to transport the data. There's no rhyme or reason to what was leaked, it's looks like wholesale whatever could be retrieved…
Which really begs the question why they don't have some automatic monitoring on who starts accessing a hundred thousand documents not related to their day to day job.
"There have been suggestions that an alarm system to detect suspicious use of the network was suspended for US military personnel in Iraq after they complained it was inconvenient."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/28/siprnet-america-...
As someone who grew in the Mideast and spent some time in the US/EU/Aus, I was often amazed how completely detached Westerners are from the way the rest of the world works. Left wingers or conservatives, so many guns & money have been sheltering the past 2-3 generations from reality that they genuinely believe most people share their values and goals, and that the world operates similarly to their own surroundings. I…
http://www.fas.org/sgp/library/quist2/chap_7.html
There are apparently no top secret documents in this leak, top secret documents would include such things as detailed plans for war.
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And this actually proves an important point about the various three-letter agencies: they're not really the nefarious organizations that exist in the imaginations of people who have seen too many movies. Jason Bourne's CIA would has assassinated Julian Assange a long time ago. The real one just grumbles.
What good would assassinating him do? He's not the only one who runs Wikileaks or has access to the information. They'd need to "snatch" everyone who has access to it, which might be a very difficult proposition, not to mention a complete public relations disaster, considering Wikileaks is in the public spotlight right now. I very much doubt the CIA is holding back out of the goodness of their hearts. No. What we are…
Assange is only a viable target if there is no other leader waiting at the wings if he dies. Our impression of WikiLeaks' organization structure is that no such "Assange" exists yet.
As someone who grew in the Mideast and spent some time in the US/EU/Aus, I was often amazed how completely detached Westerners are from the way the rest of the world works. Left wingers or conservatives, so many guns & money have been sheltering the past 2-3 generations from reality that they genuinely believe most people share their values and goals, and that the world operates similarly to their own surroundings. I…
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It depends on the definition of lynching. I have no doubt that anyone released from Guantanamo into the United States would be subject to harassment, if not actual danger. The people in congress arguing vociferously against their release must have reasons, and as far as I can see that's either the belief that everyone in Guantanamo deserves to be there, or the belief that it will result in violence if they come to th…
I think their biggest fear is that once in the US they would sue the US government for unlawful acts and succeed.