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> [DELETED] planned to gather intelligence against the leaders of the protest groups That's where RetroShare comes in: http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/ It's: 1. Decentralized (real p2p, no central servers) 2. Encrypted communication 3. Easier to set up than encrypted email: Install -> Exchange "certificates" -> Done. IMO, it's currently the best way to communicate.
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No. Conspiring to commit murder is definitely not protected by the First Amendment. And even fantasizing openly, which should be protected as long as no attempt is made to act on the fantasy, has tended to get people locked up in recent years.
If no actual preparations were made to execute the plan, it would be clear violation of the 1st amendment. What is the case of being locked up for fantasizing?
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Abortion of a foetus with an identifiable disability is considered acceptable today by many people, which is similar in spirit if not in practice to eugenics.
I'm sorry, but no. There's no equivalence in spirit between a crying mother deciding that it's in the best interests of her family to terminate a pregnancy and a bunch of scary-eyed fanatics trying to make humanity "better". I'm assuming you've never known anyone go through that. It's a personal tragedy, not an intellectual issue.
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Slightly tangential, but I'm pretty sure eugenicists were never thought of in the same way as communists et al. In the US, eugenics was an important idea in the Progressive Era of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, and while it wasn't universally liked (the Catholic church being a notable opponent), it did have broad social approval and at least a few countries practiced eugenics in some form. This all chan…
Abortion of a foetus with an identifiable disability is considered acceptable today by many people, which is similar in spirit if not in practice to eugenics.
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But they were calling the Occupy people potential terrorists...not the right-wingers who might've wanted to assassinate their leaders. Strange, isn't it?
No. You have a second-hand, uncorroborated report that someone within the FBI and/or DHS referred to the Occupy movement as terrorists, with no context whatsoever. First, without context or a link to the source the report is meaningless. The documents that are cited in this report make no such characterization. Second, these two organizations are huge. It's entirely possible that someon in the FBI wrote a report desc…
I agree that this is not something to be outraged about, but it is something to be watchful of and to be called out - government agencies should not refer to peaceful or even violent protesters as terrorists, and our laws should not distinguish between terrorists and other suspects in terms of the rights we give them. In this particular case I agree we need more evidence to say anything meaningful, but there are plenty of examples of misuse of powers given to our states to deal with terrorists for other purposes.
Context matters a lot, and so do primary sources. This sort of political free-association that you seem to enjoy quickly ends up in conspiracy-theory territory because it's not falsifiable.
That is mostly my objection to the use of the label terrorist - the meaning of the term has been stretched to encompass so many acts (from giving money, to riots, to bombing a market), and the judgement calls required to choose between freedom-fighter and terrorist are so subjective, that use of the term limits the horizons of any debate to a narrow exchange of slogans. It is similar to the epithet traitor when applied to Edward Snowden. It's simply a way to shut down debate without further thought, and classify others as in a group you could never parley with or understand.
What's interesting about both the Snowden case and terrorism when it comes to the US is that in both cases the government sees some acts as good, and others as bad a priori, when in character they are exactly the same. This administration leaks classified secrets all the time, but those are good leaks, whereas Snowden's leaks to journalists are bad leaks. Obama stood in the former jail cell of a terrorist at the weekend and contemplated freedom and the terrorist's struggle to end Apartheid.
These issues are complex and shouldn't be reduced to sound-bites or slogans, and the label of terrorist is particularly dangerous in the west at present as it has been used to justify ignoring our laws on human rights, privacy, and justice for whole swathes of people. As soon as you are associated (even a few degrees removed) from activity deemed terrorist, your rights no longer exist. That's extremely dangerous.
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The grandparent didn't do that. His/her point was that governments do .
Governments can lie. But terrorist is not an arbitrary term to stifle dissent - it is a specific and identifiable tactic used to achieve certain goals. If somebody says black is white, it doesn't mean black and white are arbitrary labels that can be applied to anything. That's the false dichotomy that is offered to us.
But yes, terrorism does mean something; just the way the word is used a lot, kinda doesn't... but this doesn't change what is terrorism and what is not. Even if someone where to argue that the ends justify the means, it would not change what those means are.
It's interesting news for sure, but using this to bash the FBI seems especially one-sided.
Had the actors in this story been different, I think the reaction would be different. Had LulzSec planned to attack some company but never did, and then they all went to prison for that, but it turns out it was just a bunch of people trying to impress each other with grand ideas, where would we stand on that story?
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The grandparent didn't do that. His/her point was that governments do .
But Governments are neither homogenous nor monolithic. Saying 'Governments do X' is like saying 'corporations are at the root of all our problems.' Reason along those lines, and pretty soon the only rational choice is to become a hermit and avoid society entirely. After all, society is made up of people, and people are well-known to engage in murder, rape, robbery, etc. etc. Therefore, people are the problem.
Social structures do things, and are amenable to institutional analysis. This allows us to act without omniscience. Institutional analysis allows one to analyze institutions independently of individuals; replace all the people, and you may nevertheless expect similar outcomes. Thus we can perform institutional analysis on governments, corporations, mafias, economies, consumers, managers, startups, etc.
If this weren't the case, humans wouldn't form institutions in the first place.
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Slightly tangential, but I'm pretty sure eugenicists were never thought of in the same way as communists et al. In the US, eugenics was an important idea in the Progressive Era of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, and while it wasn't universally liked (the Catholic church being a notable opponent), it did have broad social approval and at least a few countries practiced eugenics in some form. This all chan…
Abortion of a foetus with an identifiable disability is considered acceptable today by many people, which is similar in spirit if not in practice to eugenics.
And yes, it was very much an accepted area of thought and research in academia from the late 1800s to the end of the second world war. It wasn't until it became associated with Nazi Germany that the idea became taboo.