311–320 of 560 posts
The real issue is that we’re still guessing. Does anyone actually feel confident about any of this?
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I have no idea but I sure hope so.
Will this result in bloody civil war like in Iraq and minimal dysfunctional central government after?
The clerics are a paper tiger. Their domestic support base has been almost fully eroded. The Islamic Revolution had proclaimed the hijab as a cause célèbre; today, Iranians generally ignore it when the government isn't looking, after decades of protest and suppression.
But the Iranian military controls a vast amount of the country's economy (by comparison to normal countries) and retains popular support as an opponent of the West. It won't go quietly, and Israel lacks the resources and the United States lacks the will to dismantle it, which anyway would be a Herculean undertaking and cost millions of innocent lives. Military dictatorships are usually pragmatic on social issues, economically protectionist, and politically repressive — making the hypothetical new Iran look more like China's ideal ally than America's.
The most likely vector of regime change is a military coup that produces a government which sues for peace. They may agree to dismantle the nuclear program, but there will be a sense of "for now", and they will cultivate alliances with an eye to protection from the West. We may then see real nuclear weapons in Iran, but with red flags and yellow stars on them, instead of the imaginary nuclear weapons that were invented to keep Bibi out of prison.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You may know more about this than I do, but what happened in Iraq was that the first military governor held together the same people who were under Saddam in a semi-stable arrangement, but was replaced with someone else that had instructions from Washington to conduct "De-Ba'athification," for some reason. This lead quickly to the collapse of the state due to the persecution of everyone who had any authority, and the…
i don't get that. Saddam Hussain was a genocidal, fascist lunatic. The world is certainly a better place with him gone. Even if America didn't handle the subsequent occupation too well, i would argue (and you are free to disagree) that Iraq was still better off. But an American occupation isn't even on the table. Nobody is interested in that. The most anyone wants at the moment is for the US to drop a MOAB on fordo a…
For an average individual going about their day, lack of political freedom is a 100x better option than lack of food or security that Iraq (or Libya or Afghanistan) went through.
I’m not sure if Iran’s claim is true, but honestly, I’ve always felt uneasy about what these apps actually log. End-to-end encryption is great, but it doesn’t protect metadata. The real issue is that we’re still guessing. Does anyone actually feel confident about any of this?
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Probably because it's fairly difficult to detect. I doubt the code imports backdoor.dll. The UK now has laws to gag domestic companies and force them to implement backdoors.
And Australia has a law forcing its citizens, around the world, to code in backdoors.
I vote thusly.
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so, gaza is going back to egypt and everybody is locked there behind fence. and west bank is annexed by jordan ? sounds good
Gaza and West Bank as Palestinian territory. That means that Israel would have to retreat to its 1967 borders.
this is what 1967 borders are. feel free to check maps, wiki, etc. There are no palestinian territory on map at 1967 borders
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Easily. The alternatives are also probably up to the same sketchy shit, so your choices are to be a hermit, or accept that your services will spy on you. If you want to participate in society, you have to either trust a very large list of untrustworthy people... Or acknowledge that they are untrustworthy, and mitigate accordingly. Part of that mitigation is accepting the possibility that if the Mossad want to murder…
don’t use any alternatives. I have been off social media for years now and my life and health and relationships and career and … have improved so much I cannot put it in words. even if one says “well that’s crazy, I must get my dopamine through an “app” on my phone meta is on another level of insanity to even consider infesting your life and especially your loved one’s life
> I have been off social media for years now and my life and health and relationships and career and … have improved so much I cannot put it in words.
It sounds like you personally had a problem. Congratulations I suppose on solving it. However, I have no such issues. My life, health and relationships are all already where I want them to be, and are not impacted by occasional interaction with others through technology as luckily, I have had no such struggles with self control or moderation.
My relationships would be impacted on the other hand if I was to throw a big toddler tantrum about using whatsapp for two weeks whilst i'm overseas with my employer and twenty other people. So i'm probably not going to do that.
I find the wordsmithery on Meta's statement the most interesting: “We do not track your *PRECISE* location, we don’t keep logs of who everyone is messaging and we do not track the *PERSONAL* messages people are sending one another," it added. “We do not provide *BULK* information to any government.”
If you read around their points, it sounds like they track general location, log group messages, and provide specific information on request to a government.
The real question is where they draw the line, not if they do it ever.