511–520 of 587 posts
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> as a means of settling disputes As a means of forcing someone to unwillingly settle a dispute in your favor that is. I have no sympathy for North Korea, but sanctions are not an alternative to war. Sanctions are an alternative to bullets.
War is simply the continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means.
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> As a means of forcing someone to unwillingly settle a dispute in your favor that is. what kind of strange take it is? What do you think war is ?
Someone recently explained their view, that sanctions are akin to siege warfare in days of old. Whether you agree with that analogy or not, there is an underlying valid point that not all warfare requires physical violence. We use the term cyber warfare as another example.
All warfare requires physical violence. If it's not physically violent, “warfare” is being used as a loose metaphor, not a factual description.
> We use the term cyber warfare as another example.
Cyberwarfare not directed at or effectuating physical destruction of materiel and/or persons is merely metaphorical rather than actual warfare, or is part of the information component of a broader war. (OTOH, cyberwarfare can be, in fact, a direct means of achieving physical destruction of materiel and/or persons.)
Called it. :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21666694 Doing the guidelines sentence exercise is sort of fun, in a nerd-snipey way, and is a way to understand a bit of how federal criminal law works for us non-lawyers.
And what exactly one exercises by doing that?
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Business Insider isn't a great source, but I don't like primary sources: They will be very biased in their own interest. A good secondary source can provide context, information from sources that disagree or have other perspectives or concerns, etc. That's one reason Wikipedia requires secondary sources.
This is like... the weirdest post to bring that up on. DoJ announcements are some of the driest, most precisely worded press releases from any organisation on the planet. You could not hope for a better primary source. When you read "co-conspirators", did you think oh, DoJ is biased, they're using heavily charged terms to make us feel a certain way? They aren't! He was charged with a conspiracy offence. That's what t…
Criminal accusations by the government are assumed to be biased; the legal system is built around that: Innocent until proven beyond a reasonable doubt to be guilty, an entirely independent branch of government decides whether its proven, and then that branch relies on 12 civilians.
The US Department of Justice has a long history of bias, especially against non-conformists (maybe not the perfect word to characterize it, but hopefully that conveys it).
I met Virgil at an academic workshop back in 2014. We went out in Amsterdam. He was a weird guy, to say the least (he’d probably be the first to agree). He was generally quite affable and obviously highly intelligent. He’s an idiot for this fiasco. But it’s also sad to see him in jail; I don’t see how this benefits society in any way. Five years in prison seems like a disproportionate punishment for an arguably victi…
Victimless? North korea is not a victimless country. There's a reason why they are sactioned. He clearly broke a big and important law and knew he was doing it. idk what else one would expect
North Korea is sanctioned because they won't let Amazon, McDonald's, Netflix, BlackRock, Google, and a myriad of other highly destructive and financially motivated corporate entities run amok in their country.
Edit: Downvote it all you want. Nobody will disprove what I've said here.
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You should look into MAD, and why the USSR and USA signed a treaty restricting anti-missile defenses. If any country was close to getting ironclad missile shields, it's adversaries would probably act preemptively.
Also look into Jason P Lowery, and Mutually Assured Preservation concept. PoW Cryptocurrencies, specifically Bitcoin, will end all war. Modern war can only be perpetual with loose monetary policy. Fix the money, fix the world. Post MAD, the strategic battle was over post 70s. The tactical, hash warfare battle is the next phase we will have to live through. Eventually we realize we are all on the same Planet Earth tea…
Now that’s a quote for the ages…
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It similarly sucks that our justice system punishes the clumsy criminals and lets the really skillfully sneaky ones go unpunished. Nobody has yet faced charges for robbing the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
That's why I find the fact that real murder and attempted murder have different sentences to be a grave injustice. Criminals should not receive a discount on their sentence because they happened to be a bad shot or because the good trauma surgeon was on duty that night.
If attempted murder and murder have the same penalty, there's no reason for a psychopath to not attempt it again. On the net, it might even be better for them since dead people can't testify.
I've heard a similar argument for why we should lower penalties for drug crimes. When people routinely have enough drugs laying around to be charged equivalently to murder, the law ceases to be a deterrent. There's no additional penalty for more crimes, because we've already maxed out the punishment. It's not like we're going to make them live to 270 so they can serve out their full sentence.
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This is like... the weirdest post to bring that up on. DoJ announcements are some of the driest, most precisely worded press releases from any organisation on the planet. You could not hope for a better primary source. When you read "co-conspirators", did you think oh, DoJ is biased, they're using heavily charged terms to make us feel a certain way? They aren't! He was charged with a conspiracy offence. That's what t…
Dryness and bias are independent of each other. Criminal accusations by the government are assumed to be biased; the legal system is built around that: Innocent until proven beyond a reasonable doubt to be guilty, an entirely independent branch of government decides whether its proven, and then that branch relies on 12 civilians. The US Department of Justice has a long history of bias, especially against non-conformi…
It is also perfectly acceptable to take their word for what he has been convicted OF. Convictions are how we write history. We have now answered the following question: did this guy conspire to violate sanctions? The answer was yes. All of the things they detailed in https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-citizen-who-conspired-assi... are things they tested in court and proved. (Very rarely, that process gets it wrong. But it is okay for the average Joe to accept convictions as the truth. It's the best we have. If someone's conviction is overturned, the truth changes. If you no longer have a judiciary of sufficient independence to ensure this, lawyers will stop recommending you believe verdicts, and they'll be screaming about it.)
Beyond that, you did not get ANY more commentary from the DoJ. They did not go on a rant about how Bitcoin's ideological foundations are in defying US hegemonic control over its currency, ultra libertarianism, how this was bound to happen, etc.. You did not get a political statement about how it should be brought within the banking regulations to ensure more transparency by Coinbase-like entities that might be used to evade sanctions further. All of which you may have been given in bucketloads by any secondary source.
Yes, DoJ has a long history of trying to send people to jail, even people who don't deserve it. The feds are very powerful and very smart, and if they indict you for something, the chances of a conviction are very high, because if they're not convinced to a high degree, they do not prosecute. I think there's a place for your rule: you should be careful of believing 100% anything that involves a DoJ accusation but no indictment. I would completely understand Wikipedia's position that they don't use a pure accusation by the government of a crime as evidence of guilt to back up an entry saying "they did X" on Wikipedia. But the rest of it is both newsworthy and consequential, and as I said before perfectly good as a primary source evidencing the facts and outcomes of the judicial process.
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Someone recently explained their view, that sanctions are akin to siege warfare in days of old. Whether you agree with that analogy or not, there is an underlying valid point that not all warfare requires physical violence. We use the term cyber warfare as another example.
> there is an underlying valid point that not all warfare requires physical violence. All warfare requires physical violence. If it's not physically violent, “warfare” is being used as a loose metaphor, not a factual description. > We use the term cyber warfare as another example. Cyberwarfare not directed at or effectuating physical destruction of materiel and/or persons is merely metaphorical rather than actual war…
That is still a form of warfare.