Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Now now, even the most hick Republcians always use the hard r. It's right there in the party manifesto.

[alway]

So this was revealed today: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/02/sim-card-makers-hacked-by-nsa-and-gchq-leaving-cell-networks-wide-open/
Apparently the NSA workign with GCHQ hacked a european provider of SIM cards, heavily monitoring tech workers in the process, and now pretty much have access to anything using that for encyption.


So who wants to bet this info was then passed on to the makers of Stingrays, and is the reason why they are so secretive about them and their operation that they won't even tell judges?

[Glowcat]

I don't think political parties are any different anymore. It feels like we're in a high class shell game and we keep trying to find the political party that will actually help and do what they claim but all their words are empty. Everything's a distraction from the fact that all the parties serve the same people with the exact same purpose. It's just the words they say are different.

There are pretty big differences between the parties.

Democrats: Continue the Fordist-Keynesian tradition of attempting to incorporate marginalized groups so that they too have a stake in the Capitalist system. At least sympathetic to such concerns in general. Continue a similar tradition with emphasis on Labor Unions, despite the destruction of local labor's ability to negotiate due to shifting global economy which is hostile to "life-long career" model that was dominant during FordKeynesian heyday (up until the 1970s pretty much) - even as they continue to play upon that nostalgia in rhetoric. Support economic relief for middle or working class people rather than invest entirely in capitalist-class welfare. Believe in the political institution's ability to solve problems - which is increasingly questionable with current government power as we veer towards "this is starting to look like a Hypercorp..." territory and businesses become less bound to any nation state)

Republicans: Appeal to social reactionaries. Explicitly support measures/ideas to further conservative beliefs and stigmatize marginalized people further by aggravating around the areas they are broadly recognized as deviants in. Either believe the least stable form of Capitalism, laissez-faire, will somehow not crash into an even bigger mess than it did historically but now with the increasingly less-bound global corporate monopolies who seem rather able to exploit labor as a commodity without local government assistance, i.e. the "Pure" Libertarian group, or they actively support government intervention for the capitalist-class's benefit in obtaining "competitive" labor and other benefits (e.g. exploiting the prison wage system, holding power over undocumented immigrants to abuse their labor while keeping them stigmatized, assist in building markets, provide government aid to corporations via subsidies, etc.) Even those who support government regulation for corporate benefit do so under a major tenet of Liberalism, the belief in the power of private institutions to spontaneously solve social problems through the market.

Of course both rely on military power to protect overseas interests, and while Democrats want to pursue action against economic inequality it's more to keep this unstable and anti-human abomination that is Capitalism running or do so for benefit of the nation-state as a whole rather than being born out of compassion (at least on a party scale). They are also both invested in the party systems which keep their organizations (and thus themselves) in power.

[Zrk2]

That's an... interesting way of describing them.

[Angle]

pretty accurate, though.

[mainiac]

I stopped laying attention to politics and news when
Almost all the politicians (lol I say that like there is more than two political parties with a chance of a successful run) don't seem to be that great

With the voter participation rate at such low levels I think you have the direction of causation backwards.

[Sheb]

TBH Cryxis, it seems what you hear in ROTC seems mostly bullcrap (It's those guys that told you about Saddam's WMD totally existing but being stolent by AQAP or something, right?)

[Frumple]

... to add to th'bit above, from my personal interaction with conservative individuals, particularly of the republican bent, I would absolutely expect a major republican politician to say they want to declare war on Islam. I hear it on the ground disturbingly regularly. These are not people that separate islamic radicals from the rest of them, these are people that are perfectly and cheerful content with things like the civilian death toll in afghanistan and iraq because they were muslim. Yes, including the children. Yes, I've heard this explicitly stated. Repeatedly. By a disturbing number of different people. Quite a few of the people the politicians in question are pandering to are not even remotely rational or nuanced on the subject in question. They have been convinced/convinced themselves that all muslims are deserving of death, for whatever reason.

And republican politicians definitely have members among them that are perfectly willing to pander to the point of genocidal insanity.

[RedKing]

Well, and I've heard things like "We should just turn that whole part of the world to glass" for a couple of decades now (at first referencing the Israel/Palestine problem, then Iraq, and now Palestine-Libya-Syria-Iraq-Afghanistan-Iran-Alltheseplacesarerightnexttoeachotheranywaysright?



There are in fact people for whom "Nuke it from orbit -- only way to be sure" isn't a movie quote or a meme, it's a valid foreign policy suggestion.

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

TBH Cryxis, it seems what you hear in ROTC seems mostly bullcrap (It's those guys that told you about Saddam's WMD totally existing but being stolent by AQAP or something, right?)

I wasn't paying attention to well
it was along the lines of the WMD's that we thought were in Iraq when we invaded just got handed over from terrorists in Iraq to those in (Syria? Saudi Arabia?) under the united states's noses and some of those were the weapons that got used by a dictator on his own people a few years later.

The point I was trying to make wasn't that the information was right it was that I already have my fill of listening to how horrible this world is everyday so I don't care too much

also ROTC has absolutly no ties in my political opinons however

[Reelya]

Saddam was a paranoid control freak with a police state along Soviet lines. Those types of dictators don't tend to want to arm up anyone they can't directly control, they don't tend hand out heavy weaponry willy nilly to loose cannon types. There's really no evidence that he was closely aligned with radical islamist groups. He was leader of a state based on conventional armed forces, actively fighting against radical islamists for most of the time period that matters. The idea that Saddam would e.g. build nukes then hand them out like christmas bonuses to roving bands of lunatics really defies the logic of why all heavily centralized states make nukes: not to use them, but to say "bugger off! I got nukes buddy!" Giving nukes away to loonies sort fails at being a deterrent, because it causes you to be more likely to be attacked rather than less. If he had a few nukes, he wouldn't be secreting them off to random nutters, he'd be stockpiling them to use as a diplomatic club to threaten people with.

Iraq and Saudi Arabia actually had extremely close relations in the 1980's due to mutual fear of an Iranian-style islamist revolution spreading, with Iraq getting a significant amount of aid from the Saudis to fight against Iran. Saddam was getting aid from both the USA and USSR at the same time too. If Saddam was doing stuff that would destabilize any of his benefactors that wouldn't go unnoticed, and would jeapardize the military aid that kept Iraq alive against Iran.

Tying this back to the USA, USA did in fact have an official program which was arming up islamic terrorists in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. Osama bin Laden was amongst these people. Since Iraq in the 1980's was receiving massive amounts of military aid from both the soviets and the americans during the Iran/Iraq war, it doesn't make a lot of sense that he'd be amongst the sponsors of these groups, which evolved into Al Qaeda in the 1990s.

Note that America was secretly arming up both Iraq and Iran with heavy weapons (AA and anti-tank) but also prohibited chemical weapons to both sides (see Time magazine, the guardian articles I linked) during the Iran/Iraq war (anything to make a profit I guess, the USA are like the Pherengi, but more deadly), plus created the networks of saboteur training camps in Afghanistan which later became Al Qaeda. Thanks for doing all that, guys.

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

it wasn't that he was handing them out willy nilly, he was handing them off so US wouldn't find anything, and its plausable if they were friends at the time.
I'm not saying its true I am just trying to say why I thought it was believable

[smjjames]

Yeah, we have a long and complex history of meddling in the region. Well, 'long' in this case goes back to the cold war period. No idea how much we paid attention to the region before the 20th century, if we even paid attention at all.

It's kind of like all that meddling and Cold War sheneinighans are coming back to bite us in the ass.

Also, Pherengi? I guess you meant Ferengi?

[RedKing]

Prior to the 1950's, we had a pretty hands-off policy regarding the Middle East and were actually highly regarded by most Arab states because we were about the only major power who didn't have a history of imperialism in the region. Even as late as 1956, you had the US (and the Soviet Union) siding with Egypt against Israel, Britain and France.

But the fact that US economic threats didn't seem to deter the UK-France-Israeli alliance, and Soviet threats of force did cost the US influence in the region and moved a lot of nascent Arab states closer to the USSR. Which meant that we had to play the whole "enemy of my enemy is my friend" game and side closer with Israel. And now that position is so entrenched into US politics that any movement back towards a more neutral position regarding Israel is tantamount to treason for most on the Right (and many on the Left).

[Reelya]

it wasn't that he was handing them out willy nilly, he was handing them off so US wouldn't find anything, and its plausable if they were friends at the time.
I'm not saying its true I am just trying to say why I thought it was believable

Anything sounds believable if your nations media is repeating it often enough. But I've never seen any evidence that Saddam had relations with even a single terrorist group. Saddam was allied with the Saudi Government in the 1980's, against the Iranian theocracy. Saudi terrorist groups mostly want to create their own theocracy, which is definitely not something Saddam would desire: it would mean he had a Shiite theocracy to the east and a Sunni theocracy to the south, pretty much ensuring his Sunni/Shiite mixed country would get dragged into some weird holy war, and he'd be replaced by competing clerics.

Anyway, if he seriously had WMDs and needed to offload them, he would hand them to a friendly government (maybe Syria) not a terrorist group. He had nothing to gain from rogue groups blowing stuff up.

The silliest part is that most of these theories present foreign leaders like supervillains from Marvel or DC comics who only live to blow stuff up and destabilize their regions. Here's the real deal: people like their region to be stable, and it's external powers who come in and destabilize shit because they don't give a fuck.

Chomsky notes the term "stability" in US media actually means "US influence is strong here" regardless of how stable things are. And the term "destabilizing" is in fact used any time US power is diminished in a region, including when regions that previously needed US presense to keep the peace start getting along too well. e.g. Venezuela or Iran giving gifts to neighboring countries to boost relations, has been described as "destabilizing" in US media, whereas American toppling governments and causing wars is always described as "improving stability".