281–290 of 381 posts
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It's easy if you make it up. It's also easy to find "presence of anything" in some members of any large group, including satanism, doesn't mean it defines the group or is a big element of it.
And this attitude is why hundreds of thousands of liberal and left-wing Jews no longer support the Labour party.
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My outrage against dragnet was never about me, personally. I know I am way too unimportant to surveil. It has always been about the next thought leader, who could come from any background, from being nipped in the bud. I'm sure "they" would have loved being able to contain MLK Jr before he even had a chance to have any following » Why should I be enraged if government officials were put under surveillance? I am not w…
They even tried it back in the day and with the modern surveillance we probably would not have heard from him at all. Just the right bribe to deflect the issues and it will never become a large issue in the first place. It doesn't even have to be malicious, there are people working in these agencies that are trained to follow orders. They believe intrinsically that what they do is necessary for security. No appeal wi…
That's thr rub isn't it - if you startva security agency thst does terrible things, it will hire people that can somehow justify and rationalise those terrible things
Very few people in KGB or whatever thought that they did anything wrong
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> There is no constitution, bill of rights, and while there are elections in the mainland The UK is a constitutional monarchy and does have a bill of rights. > nominates huge numbers of Bishops to the British Parliament It's a bit more nuanced than that. The Queen doesn't nominate anyone to Parliament, at least not in the way you're implying. Just like she has to sign a bill into law before it has any effect, she doe…
You say all this about the UK's constitution but it is not codified anywhere. Is it based on precedence, custom or generally accepted principle that it will happen this way if things do come to a crisis. It all seems to be asserted resting on....on an uncodified constitution.
New laws can be iteratively created rather than relying on extremely old documents and lawyers/historians who attempt to decipher what was intended and how that relates to modern times.
If the US constitution was converted into a set of laws and then deleted, what do you think would happen? Attempts to be made to change the laws, some would pass, some would fail, but the passing of those laws would still be democratic if those making them were democratically elected.
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I have a problem with Israel and its politics, not with Jews or any other religion. Does that make me an antisemit? Because then the term has been redefined and I'll gladly wear it
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Russia's been a pain in the arse continuously. 20 years ago they were up to their eyeballs in the Iranian nuclear programme, carpet bombing Chechnya, blowing up their own apartment blocks and blaming it on terrorists, destabilising Georgia and goodness knows what else. That's all just from memory. But they have a lot of oil and gas so we let it all slide. More fool us.
You are aware that the Israely government does similar things, right?
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These products, just like any offensive weapon, aren't quite as useful for defensive purposes, or when used by someone who doesn't do this stuff 24/7. The justification that "somebody else would have done it" is morally bankrupt, of course, as shown in Nuremberg or the Eichmann trial. It's also just not true: by definition, the alternative would be worse in some way, or it would have been the first choice from the be…
Ah yes, because export controls have stopped bad actors in the past. If we can't stop Iran and North Korea from developing nuclear weapons, thinking that we can stop sale of software is, mildly speaking, delusional. I also fail to see the relevance to Nuremberg trials, because this is a simple matter of supply and demand. There definitely is demand.
I am not convinced if we way we treated Iran is justified, but thats a different suvject. And after Ukraine, noone will. Ever give up nukes
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And this attitude is why hundreds of thousands of liberal and left-wing Jews no longer support the Labour party.
Which attitude? Basic sense?
This is a bit of a tangent but I think reports like these strengthen the argument against electronic voting. There's basically no way of building a secure electronic voting system that can beat the security and auditability properties of old school pen and paper voting.
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> "Like, yeah, blame the UAE mostly for this but let's also have a discussion about why this was sold to anyone who would pay with no oversight at all. Western countries need to do better." The UK itself is one of the largest weapon exporters in the world, exporting to many countries in the Middle East with dubious human rights track records. The UK government can't possibly know what happens with every single pistol…
> The UK government can't possibly know what happens with every single pistol, bullet, missile or drone they sell You say that, but UK export law imposes a bunch of conditions, including that you're not knowingly facilitating resale to embargoed countries. And the legality of exports to Saudi Arabia has been litigated - it's legal, but only just.
Both the UK and Israel have export law, complete with conditions and legal frameworks for enforcement. It surely reduces the possibility of weapons ending up in the wrong hands, but it doesn't eliminate it completely. Regardless, it still doesn't imply that the manufacturers themselves or the jurisdictions they are incorporated in should somehow bear blanket responsibility for misuse.
Cyber-weapons and spying are particularly complex from this perspective, because it can be difficult to draw the lines on what constitutes as "misuse". Especially when the operator of the weapon is part of a government (a law-enforcement agency, for example), and when the victim is a citizen of a foreign jurisdiction.
With this out of the way, we're only really left with the "legal, but immoral" argument. I'm not going to argue against that (mainly because this is where things get very subjective and nuanced) - but I will say that the bar for holding an entire government accountable by invocation of "major diplomatic incidents" should be higher than that.
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Israel plays the anti-semitism card much too loosely to be taken seriously. The issues I have with Israel are because of the actions of its government and absolutely nothing to do with the majority religion there. If you criticise Israel, you're an anti-semite. We're all scared of being called such, so we let them do whatever the fuck they want. Fuck Israel; but not because of their religion.
This rhetoric is not any different than conservatives arguing Af-Am play the 'race card'. In both cases there's actual bigotry that some people want to sweep under the rug by a mindless counter-accusation.