France looking at banning Tor, blocking public Wi-Fi
arstechnica.co.uk
arstechnica.co.uk
I knew it from the beginning that they would abuse the State of Emergency decree and turn the lives of people esp minorities into a living hell.
[0]: https://wiki.laquadrature.net/%C3%89tat_urgence/Recensement# ((FR))
On the other hand, Muslims are people too, and it is extremely unjust to punish all Muslims for the actions of a radical sect. I think that Europe is in danger of lurching rightward and tempting the return of ethno-religious cleansing. Fascism is not pretty, and the danger for Europeans is real.
Sure, but why stop there instead of going just a tiny bit deeper and identifying the money layer? You'll find it has a lot less to do with religion and a lot more to do with efforts by the House of Saud to maintain an increasingly dubious hold on worldly power. You'll also find a rat's nest of illiberal interests from nominally liberal countries with an interest in their survival. Thus, the broader desire to deflect attention from the very dark and concentrated heart of this to a much more diffuse and amorphous target like "radical islam".
Every time you're tempted to say "radical Islam" try saying "Saudi Arabia" instead. More often than not, you'll find you've hit on the more accurate term.
But take it a step further. Who funds Saudi Arabia, and why? Who backs radical Sunnis, and why? Who backs the radical Shia? Geopolitical problems have many causes and symptoms which can grow into entire pathologies in their own right when they get really out of control, as the West's idiotic power struggle with Russia in the Middle East has.
The point is that the US has its own set of deeply vested interests in these markets, and they're more than willing to tolerate what the Saudis are doing to underwrite jihadi terrorism and the Wahhabi strain of Islam that animates it if the alternative involves seriously consideration of changes to the way the developed world produces and consumes the energy it depends on.
Just imagine an army of 500 mln or so that can be mobilized with a single fiery speech or declaration. Actually, that kind of empire or army is the wildest wet dream that Sunni radicals could have.
Finally, your numbers are absurd. 500 million? Shia? In round numbers, you're off by...a lot. ~180 million is closer to the mark, and the idea that this entire population, very young and old included, is one speech away from becoming a ferocious army is beyond insane.
I'm sorry, but the way you combined deep ignorance and wild speculation with plain bad information was ugly enough. Finishing your remarks with a needless bit of vulgarity puts them way over the top.
Seriously, this is the kind of garbage you expect to find at Trump rallies, not HN.
It will be much easier with more unchecked authoritarian law in place.
Like those pesky ecologists that endanger the state by stopping economic growth and slowing down job creation at the cost of increased pollution, right?
People who commit crimes should be fined or arrested. These are preventive house arrests for crimes that they might commit in the future. You really don't see the problem with this?
By and large its not clear ISIS actually wants people to commit terror attacks in the west since it gets potentially useful recruits killed not fighting for territory in the middle East (note they are big on how you should definitely move to the ISIS territories).
Joking aside, if activists committed any crime, you follow the legal procedures and challenge them in a court of law before a judge and let the defendants present their case in a free trial and see if any of the charges you brought against them sticks, otherwise shut up and leave them alone because if you start allowing police to hand out sentences without legal recourse to challenge these arbitrary punishments, you'll descend slowly into a police state and horrific society to live within.
First, it wasn't a joke. Second, we were discussing putting environment activists under arbitrary house arrest not terrorists or terrorism. Your anger at the tragic death should be directed at the terrorists or the security apparatus which failed miserably to protect people in the "west" and not at me or the activists.
Try next time to read the comments first before jumping into the discussion.
You have to get a verdict first in order to detain them and not let them do the job for you and make them go through hardships for a redress and emergency laws are not just or fair to entertain them .
Rather than fight and complain piecemeal in response to government oversteps in their attempts to stop terror, dissenters need to formulate a concrete affirmative plan for dealing with terror while maintaining civil liberties and privacy. I'm not sure exactly what this plan would look like, but without something organized to push for, the government is going to keep getting their way and making everyone less free.
It's not pretty to watch.
[edit] Fear is irrational by definition, I'm not judging on that, and understand why people are afraid.
Really? I find this conclusion a little baffling, to be frank. Without saying which side of the political spectrum is more "correct", one can hardly deny that the right includes stronger reactions to perceived threats, practically by definition.
You can see it in the rhetoric, the policies, the constituents, etc of both parties. Even now, I would be surprised if policies like these were seeing equal amounts of dissent from the right and from the left (note that this is a different axis than liberal/conservative).
A good deal of French people love the nanny state and their government to meddle into their private business and run their lives but they have their differences on how to achieve that and which flavor to pick.
-- Bertrand Russell
It's not just France either. Authoritarianism is rife in much of the rest of Europe, and the rest of the world, for that matter.
France is a particularly interesting case, however. As on the one hand they're the land of Voltaire, of the French Revolution, of the ideals of "liberté, égalité, fraternité", and on the other of authoritarianism, colonialism, and xenophobia.
>The Paris massacre of 1961 was a massacre in Paris on 17 October 1961, during the Algerian War (1954–62). Under orders from the head of the Parisian police, Maurice Papon, the French National Police attacked a demonstration of some 30,000 pro-National Liberation Front (FLN) Algerians.
>After 37 years of denial, in 1998 the French government acknowledged 40 deaths, although there are estimates of over 200.
>Many demonstrators died when they were violently herded by police into the River Seine, with some thrown from bridges after being beaten unconscious. Other demonstrators were killed within the courtyard of the Paris police headquarters after being arrested and delivered there in police buses.
Here's hoping history doesn't repeat itself.
Europe's recent trend towards democracy was never really more than a trend. Democracy requires peace to flourish, without it people are going to value strongman leadership. Europe has only very recently shook off the threat of war. Nobody expects another great war, but it still takes a few hundred years before democratic institutions become robust enough to resist all the different ways the area can slide back into tyranny. Europe is not yet one polity, but they're moving in that direction.
Once people start thinking of themselves as European first, and French / German / Italian / etc. second, that's when you know Europe is really ready for democracy. It takes a while. It wasn't that long ago that United States citizens thought of themselves as citizens of their state first, then of the Union, the civil war cured us of that defect.
Perhaps Europe needs one more war to draw them together. Maybe a few of them. With luck those wars won't have to be martial in nature.
Etabli mardi 1er décembre par la direction des libertés publiques
et des affaires juridiques (DLPAJ), il recense toutes les mesures
de police administrative que les policiers et les gendarmes
souhaiteraient voir passer dans le cadre des deux projets de loi
en cours d’élaboration, l’un sur l’état d’urgence et l’autre sur
la lutte antiterroriste.
In France, generally speaking, the Police National is in charges of cities and large metropolitan areas, and the Gendarmerie is seen in rural areas. They live in barracks, and are weird in that they answer both to the ministry of interior and to the ministry of defense.
There are many such tricks, another is to bring the important stuff up for vote in the last little bit before a session closes and to waste as much of the session prior to that by debating some inane point of some un-important issue at great length leaving insufficient time to debate the important stuff.
It's all tricks and psychology, reason has little to do with it.
This practice is culturally independent and it is as old as human corruption. Egyptians and ancient Chinese and Romans were already experts.)
It takes a certain determination to stand up to that kind of threat.
And the slightly more cynical view is that they are using the attacks to push through legislation that they wanted for other reasons AND they're using a story of hypothetical public opinion after hypothetical future events to make themselves seem more sympathetic.
And this is also not this is "doing everything that can be done." The Paris attackers didn't even use encryption and the attacks were not prevented, so there's a lot more things that they'd need to do before banning Tor and open wifi would even make a difference. So they'd still open to criticism from the same angle; score one for cynicism.
I agree. However, I believe the reason for this is more legislative laziness than anything else.
In the wake of a terrorist attack, the public demands that laws be changed to make them safer. The executive's law enforcement and intelligence agencies typically have a wish list that they repeatedly ask the legislature to enact, because it would make their jobs easier. The legislature, under tremendous pressure to do anything and fast, does not attempt to really analyze the legislation, but rather uses every parliamentary trick to rush it through.
The executive uses these expanded powers to check off national security goals it already had in mind (see e.g. the hundreds of arrests during the French state of emergency.)
The end result is threefold:
First the executive is emboldened to at least look like they're increasing security at home and abroad. At its worst, it either draws the nation into a war on territory chosen by the terrorists (see e.g. Afghanistan, the rock upon which the Soviet military machine shattered), or needless wars of choice which drain economic and military effectiveness (see e.g. Iraq)
Second, the country experiences an economic shock far out proportion to the actual attack, due to the fear of the populace, which directly and indirectly depresses multiple sectors of the economy.
Third, the country produces highly visible, although not necessarily highly effective, responses at the expense of sacrifice of civil liberties and personal convenience.
What's more is that terrorists count on this reaction.
They know that the costs of the response will vastly outweigh the actual damage of the attack.These particular non-state actors are deemed "terrorists" for a reason. Because their most powerful weapons are not airliners, or bombs, or assault rifles.
Their most powerful weapon is fear.
They use that fear to cause nations to make poor decisions, then exploit those decisions to advance their causes. The only solution which I can devise is simply not let fear arbitrate our decisions.
We must announce, as one voice, that we are no longer afraid.
Ah, but therein lies a little problem: we probably can't be made safer and eventually this will become obvious to the general population as well. Terrorists have it super easy in soft bellied countries like the west. We have but two choices: change our societies drastically for the worse or accept the fact that complete safety and societies such as the ones that we live in are mutually incompatible.
[W]e probably can't be made safer and eventually this will become obvious to the general population as well...
Exactly. How can you stop a few individuals from shooting up public spaces, especially in the United States? For that matter, how would you stop a pair of family members from carrying out attacks with homemade bombs?
We have but two choices: change our societies drastically for the worse or accept the fact that complete safety and societies such as the ones that we live in are mutually incompatible.
Agreed.
If we win this conflict, but sacrifice who we are in the process, then we are no better than those whom we fight.
The "public" is not the people at rallies, not even what people in the street and cafes are saying, but the tally of the vote at the next election, and politicians act accordingly.
As you can see from the first round of the regional elections, the French "public" overwhelmingly voted for more.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/50102294-77fd-11e5-a95a-27d368e1dd...
In any party political system, where your choices even when you do get to express an opinion are limited to perhaps half a dozen candidates and only 1-3 with any real chance of winning, the amount of real information you can convey to government about your preferences through voting in national elections is minuscule.
Consequently, as we see in practice, national elections are mostly dominated by a very small number of very high profile issues, and people vote for the candidate or party that most closely matches their views on their top priorities. One of these is almost always the economy. There might be another that is the political hot potato of the day, perhaps immigration or trade union relations or the fate of some popular public service.
On top of this, once a representative has been elected, in many cases they can then hold office for a full term regardless of their future actions, even if they deviate dramatically from what they said to get elected in the first place.
In this sense, our current forms of representative democracy typically are broken, because there is very little one can do as a citizen to express a nuanced view. Often you will get a choice of least-of-evils from your own perspective and that's it for another 4-6 years.
In order to overcome this, there are a few different things that I imagine would help, but they would all need fundamental changes to existing political systems.
Firstly, an elected representative could have reason to fear being unelected again if they lose the support of their electorate for too long. There is a balance to be found between protecting representatives who take decisions that are unpopular in the short term but genuinely in the long term interests of their electorate and forcing out a representative who says one thing before the election but then does another or takes an unexpected and unwelcome position on some particular issue after they've entered office. However, no politician would ever feel so safe in their position that they could do whatever they wanted without care for any consequences to their own career and influence for several more years.
Secondly, the electorate could have a mechanism to impose its will on specific issues in isolation. For example, if memory serves, a few places do have a binding referendum mechanism where the administration of the day cannot overrule the will of the people once confirmed by a referendum. Again this would presumably have to be used in moderation to be effective, but it would allow the people to express views on, say, environmental and energy policies, or the legalisation or otherwise of recreational drugs, or the legitimacy or otherwise of security measures that infringe on other freedoms. Perhaps the most valuable role of this kind of mechanism would be to highlight a subject that isn't quite a top priority in national elections, and thus to drive greater public awareness of the underlying issue and to promote associated debate.
Thirdly, a written constitution and a strong constitutional court could provide another way to mitigate opportunist or short-termist legislation that would other infringe on basic principles. Like the other two measures, this ultimately comes down to forcing an administration that wants to move the goalposts a long way to achieve and retain the positive support of a large proportion of the electorate on that specific issue for a significant period of time before the changes can become established in law. Of course, as we have seen in various countries, this can work well or not well depending on the effectiveness and independence of the constitutional court, so any such measures need adequate safeguards to ensure as much impartiality as possible.
It's all far too shallow and blurry. Hence the need to rally people on a fad argument, sad.
ps: on to reading the last half of your comment.
Well, that may be a subtle difference in interpretation but the general opinion is that we are 'unsafe' and that 'something should be done'.
Opposition parties in various countries have definitely used these attacks to create an impression that 'something could have been done' and that if they were in the driving seat 'something would have been done'. Incumbents are scared of losing voters due to being seen as 'doing nothing' and so will resort to doing 'something' just to stave off the inevitable (admitting that they don't know what to do, and neither does the opposition, mostly because there isn't a whole lot they can do to begin with that does not involve a change of course for the next 30 years and an admission that they royally messed up during the last 30 years).
>Similar false flag tactics were also employed during the Algerian civil war, starting in the middle of 1994. Death squads composed of Département du Renseignement et de la Sécurité (DRS) security forces disguised themselves as Islamist terrorists and committed false flag terror attacks.
Conspiracy theories are comforting, in a way, because they project the belief that somebody is in control. The truth is far more terrifying: no one is in control.
The second part of his point is that by positing a conspiracy theory you are presenting a view that there is an overarching plan to all this, whereas the reality is more like a bunch of headless chickens trying to run in three directions at once.
I'm just sympathetic to the viewpoint because it feels as if it is at least coming from the right place, especially as the damage from the attack is purposely amplified by the government organ of mainstream media.
For contrast: during war time there is a blanket ban on reporting 'bad news', successful attacks on ones own troops by the opponent because that is demoralizing or something to that effect. But if it really were demoralizing how come during peace time we amplify attacks way out of proportion? You'd expect that if the media being told to shut their traps would be to the advantage of those governing that this would be a fairly small thing to arrange. Instead we have the opposite, every instance of an individual event gets blown way out of proportion to push those buttons of powerful emotions.
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract
http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/rousseau1762.pdf
We see it with encryption. Yes, encryption can be and is used by bad people for evil ends, but it is also used by good people for good ends; encryption is simply the means. It's a human right to speak privately. Law enforcement can still investigate, can still use different powers to eavesdrop and compel parties to speech to reveal that speech; but it has no right to be party to private speech. Yes, bad things will not be detected as a result, but it's worth it.
We see it with arms control. Yes, weapons can be and are used by bad people to kill innocents; but they are also used by good people to defend themselves, whether from crime or tyranny. It is a human right to be armed. Law enforcement and the military can still use their superior numbers and training to overwhelm a foe, but they have no right to claim a monopoly on arms. Yes, innocents will die, but innocents will also live.
We see it with the war on some drugs. Yes, some people will take certain drugs and commit crimes; but other people will take those same drugs and enjoy a pleasant mental state. Law enforcement can still arrest criminals, but it has no right to arrest folks who haven't harmed anyone. It's a human right to alter one's mental state. The tradeoff is worth it.
The thing is, you have to take this attitude toward all things: religion; drugs; weapons; encryption; speech in general. Once you start to carve out exceptions and exclusions to liberty, you'll end up losing ever-more liberty. It happens faster than one might imagine.
The Establishment really don't care about road fatalities or substance abuse related deaths of the populace. They only care about their wealth and power.
Someone killing a hundred people who would gladly kill a hundred million if they could, and who's presumably constantly looking for a way to do it, is more frightening than a car accident, because there can't be a huge sudden increase in the rate of car accidents, but there can be and there more than once was a huge sudden increase in the amount of people killed by enemy combatants.
(Whether you think terror could ever escalate into a full-blown war is another question, and many don't think that, or they think that it is the common countermeasures against terror that result in full-blown wars rather than terror itself, etc. My only point is if it's legitimate to fear paperclip maximizers because they're "strong AI" and always achieve their goals, it should be legitimate to fear dead-people-like-you maximizers because they're a form of wetware intelligence with a good track record of achieving its goals, and they specifically want to kill you, rather than it being a likely subgoal of "make more paperclips". From a citizen's point of view, the state is equally powerless against terror and car accidents, and still the dead-people-like-you maximizer is way more frightening for many and it's not stupid to think that.)
The scariest link there - I've said this before, but there is no harm in repeating it - is that Pakistan probably has both, we're sure about their nukes and we strongly suspect they have a BW unit.
IS gaining a foothold in Pakistan gives them potential access to weapons of a totally different grade than the ones that they have today.
If that should happen and these weapons would be brought to a readiness level associated with an imminent attack or if - which I hope we'll be able to avoid but which you can't rule out entirely - an attack with such weapons would be carried out the degree and scope of response will be such that the map of the regions involved will be totally redrawn.
As soon as terrorists cross the line where all-out war against them is justified and the cost to society is one we are willing to bear (and we're far from that, right now the most people can be seen to support is to drop some bombs from a high altitude) it will be 'game over' in a relatively short time with respect to the first level of confrontation and after that we will have a repeat of the aftermath of the Iraq war but on a much larger chunk of the globe.
The world is a tinderbox and way too many idiots have matches.
Funny words: full-blown war scares me much more than mere "terror".
Replace 'enemy combatants' with 'comets'.
Do you still find your argument persuasive?
In seriousness - actually comets are a lot like car accidents (if you believe that comets aren't actively trying to kill you), the only difference is the probability distribution (and you used the comet example because of the higher variance.)
Unlike those things, the success of an intelligent being trying to kill you cannot and should not be thought of as a probability distribution. It's not like a coin being tossed, in that a coin doesn't tend to get better at falling on one side or the other (nor do car accidents or comets get better at killing you, so they are more like coin tosses.)
It matters whether there's intelligence behind the cause or not; I'm surprised at how hard this point is to make at a forum occupied mostly by programmers.
I acknowledge that there are different strains of them but deep down they're the same who only care about consolidating their power and accumulating more wealth.
Also, a lot of them share a very perverse idea of the concept of "Monopoly on Violence" pertaining to the state in modern political philosophy that they get to do whatever they like with people if they cross the line but here's the catch that where that line is drawn is left for everyone to decide.
So, when an unintentional terrorist attack occurs within their "realm", they freak out because they feel that this privilege to subjugate or coerce people is challenged or worse it's about to be used against them and then and only then you get to see the ugly face of them and who they really are.
[Well, with current tech anyways. A hyperintelligent AI with on-demand wormhole mastery could probably pull it off.]
A Belgian minister saw a PS4 console in a terrorist's room and concluded that the bad guys used the encrypted PS4 messaging system to communicate. The newspapers ran with it and this is the official narrative even today.
Guess who gets more funding to intercept more encrypted communication? And not just in France. Italy is joining the fun too, with the postal police getting new "terror watch" units that snoop on even more stuff to keep us safe.
>In 2014, 32,685 people were killed in terrorist attacks. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-11-17/global-terrorism-index...
The WHO puts global road traffic deaths at around 1 million, so if autonomous cars reduces that by a factor of 50, which seems likely, they'd kill less than terrorism.
Now if only we could apply the same rigour to the process of bringing new human beings into the world.
4600 road deaths/year sounds like those laws should try harder.
Hardly convenient but you can remove the possibility of death by traffic or alcohol.
Does anyone seriously doubt that the following, even if fabricated (no reason to suppose it is) does not represent such a fantasy.
"The ISIS laptop contains a 19-page document in Arabic on how to develop biological weapons and how to weaponize the bubonic plague from infected animals. “The advantage of biological weapons is that they do not cost a lot of money, while the human casualties can be huge,” the document states.”
No, it would hardly be convenient but if you insist, you can remove yourself from the possibility (or lessen the chances) of death by traffic or alcohol.
Does anyone seriously doubt that the following, even if fabricated (no reason to suppose it is) does not represent such a fantasy in some minds.
"The ISIS laptop contains a 19-page document in Arabic on how to develop biological weapons and how to weaponize the bubonic plague from infected animals. “The advantage of biological weapons is that they do not cost a lot of money, while the human casualties can be huge,” the document states.”
5 years later, this increase in road traffic was estimated to kill as many people as were originally dead in the twin towers. Just because people chose the car a bit more, and the plane a bit less.
Their chart is slightly different from mine, in that they're counting deaths per vehicle mile rather than deaths per passenger mile, which greatly favors cars because of their lower passenger capacity.
- With car accidents people say it's inevitable, even though it's incorrect;
- With alcohol they say they're guilty;
- With 200 non-smoker deaths every fortnight in France, it is had the same properties as terrorism: people are innocent, taken away at random, and the risk increases during leisure time.
And we don't do a minute of silence for the fallen.
- increasing limitation of speed
- seat belt
- engine limitations
- speed radar everywhere
- fine without human to attest speed excess
- driver's license removal, point system
an endless list, every few month a new liberty limitation about road death is enacted
You tell the public you're banning something they don't really use? Fine. You tell the public you're doubling police forces in a time of strong anti-police sentiment? Good luck in the next election.
In the information age, power does not lie with the one who has the guns. I hope everyone reading this takes some time to research how to encrypt your communication & how to use bitcoin.
I also hope we will see more user-friendly ways to communicate securely (BitMessage is an awesome solution for this)
Can we go without a government that properly understand the information age? If so, how? Who would you trust instead, to organize public affairs?
If not, why does this kind of government doesn't (want to) understand it?
>Because all media, from the phonetic alphabet to the computer, are extensions of man that cause deep and lasting changes in him and transform his environment. Such an extension is an intensification, an amplification of an organ, sense or function, and whenever it takes place, the central nervous system appears to institute a self-protective numbing of the affected area, insulating and anesthetizing it from conscious awareness of what’s happening to it. It’s a process rather like that which occurs to the body under shock or stress conditions, or to the mind in line with the Freudian concept of repression. I call this peculiar form of self-hypnosis Narcissus narcosis, a syndrome whereby man remains as unaware of the psychic and social effects of his new technology as a fish of the water it swims in. As a result, precisely at the point where a new media-induced environment becomes all pervasive and transmogrifies our sensory balance, it also becomes invisible.
>This problem is doubly acute today because man must, as a simple survival strategy, become aware of what is happening to him, despite the attendant pain of such comprehension. The fact that he has not done so in this age of electronics is what has made this also the age of anxiety, which in turn has been transformed into its Doppelganger–the therapeutically reactive age of anomie and apathy. But despite our self protective escape mechanisms, the total-field awareness engendered by electronic media is enabling us–indeed, compelling us–to grope toward a consciousness of the unconscious, toward a realization that technology is an extension of our own bodies.
-Marshall McLuhan
Top Intel Lawyer Says Terror Attack Would Help Push for Anti-Encryption Legislation
https://theintercept.com/2015/09/16/top-intel-lawyer-pushing...
https://theintercept.com/2015/09/11/today-14th-anniversary-e...
""Terrorism" comes from the French word terrorisme, and originally referred specifically to state terrorism as practiced by the French government during the 1793–1794 Reign of terror."
Learning from the past is hard. Or in this case, simply neglected for convenience. Cui bono?
This entire thread is so depressingly misinformed about the country that I don't have the heart to correct people.
Namely people are quick to forget that France is in fact in a state of emergency and that conditions do change when that's pulled. It doesn't mean we should lie down and accept anything and everything, but forgetting what's actually going on makes everything worse.
There are serious issues with the current french government but they have nothing to do with "the left" or "the right", as if those things ever mattered. They have to do with how NIH and technologically impaired France is and that hasn't changed since the minitel.
Now imagine the left voting all these anti-freedom laws, suspending (some) human rights (as it is the case now), and in 2 years, the far right coming into power and using the laws the left voted for their own benefits.
- it's not that known to deal with it, since if you raise questions, you're labeled as right,
- with this it powers the actual radical right.
> a ban on free and shared Wi-Fi connections during a
> state of emergency
So getting rickrolled could land you in jail? Yeah, that'll go over really effectively.
But nah, it's not that there's a large foreign population inside their country without future prospects. Oh wait, that's already happening, thanks to Angela.
but Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/01/15/france_to_end_severe...
As you can see, you could be sentenced to 6 months of jail and fined nearly $90000 for using encryption.
The one-time password telnet demon was developed at a university in Scandinavia before the ban ended in the second part of the 90s. This was a solution they weren't proud of, so naturally there wasn't written anything down about it, but it was considered better than pure telnet and it kept French users out of trouble (I hesitate to say the right side of the law, given its stupidity).
However I see your point: what if a company network (think a small shop) is shared with its employees and the password goes to their friends and they can connect from a car in the parking lot? _optout suffix for every network in France?
All that Russia wanted was to divide their enemy. New propaganda but the trick is old.
#TerroristRussia
If the state wants to control our lifes, they should have real time access to credit card and phone data.
One main issue is religions and that it turns people against each other due to different beliefs.
yet, even if we discard that previous point : forbidding religions would be exactly the same as creating one and pointing "believers" as enemies of "non believers" ... triggering more of what you try to stop
general education and broad tolerance between cultures (either religious or not) is quite probably the only way to move towards non violence and peace ...
Yes they do. From the old testament (Deuteronomy 13, 6-13) http://biblehub.com/deuteronomy/13.htm
---
If your brother, the son of your mother, or your son or your daughter or the wife you embrace or your friend who is as your own soul entices you secretly, saying, ‘Let us go and serve other gods,’ which neither you nor your fathers have known,
some of the gods of the peoples who are around you, whether near you or far off from you, from the one end of the earth to the other,
you shall not yield to him or listen to him, nor shall your eye pity him, nor shall you spare him, nor shall you conceal him.
But you shall kill him. Your hand shall be first against him to put him to death, and afterward the hand of all the people.
---
Of course, no sane priest or rabbi would ever endorse such words today. Nevertheless, they are written there for all to see and misapply.
Granted, I have taken the quote out of context. But so do religious fanatics.
You can't hand-wave this sort of thing away, since anyone can make the Bible say anything they want by selectively quoting it. You are doing more harm than good here.
The Old Testament law was set up to create a theocracy. Many infractions of the law were punishable by death. Contrast that to Jesus' teaching:
"You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect." (Matthew 5:43-8)
But of course, you'll need to understand the context in which Jesus is teaching to understand all of what he's saying in Matthew 5 and during his whole ministry.
In the very same chapter he addresses the law and says that he did not come to abolish it but to fulfill it. That statement has been a great point of contention through the ages as well.
Did I just make things worse by pulling a couple verses out of context? At least the ones I quoted don't advocate homicide.
As far as radical clerics/rabbis/priests/etc, religious leaders worth anything should encourage the congregation to look to the original texts rather than relying only on their words as final truth.
The problem right here : context. If the teachings of the Bible (or the Quran) are bound to a specific context then they shouldn't be worshiped like some universal and perfect teachings. Following these teachings then means following moral values that were only valid 2000 or 1300 years ago, in a specific context. Obviously one cannot live in a modern society while following the Bible or the Koran to the letter. While (most) Christians acknowledge that fact, irregardless of their beliefs in a creator, that's not the case of every religious group.
That's basically my problem with religion. It's a travesty, it exploits the need for spirituality every man has by trying to impose some random moral values dictated by a "superior being" nobody but a prophet has access to, without even trying to satisfy that need for spirituality at first place (since we know nothing about that being except the fact that he is "our creator"). And since men are not omniscient of course these moral values are bound to the context in which they were chosen. Religion is not faith in (a) god, but more like faith in the teachings of a man that says he has seen god.
How many people should God reveal Himself to in order for others to believe in His existence? 2? 10? 10000? Would people still believe that revelation 100 years later? 1000 years later? How would the revelation take place? God just appears in the sky? Or personally to every human?
Keep in mind that exposure to a supernatural being is a difficult thing to handle for our tiny brains. Or perhaps it flies over our heads, like when you stand among a group of ants.
You might say why doesn't God just appear regularly? That would defeat the purpose of belief. It would be too easy then. Furthermore, I'd wager that we would not have developed as a species. Why try to understand the orbits of the planets when God will just appear in a few weeks? Is there a point anymore?
I guess my point is that the "why personal revelation" argument is a tough nut to crack. If you believe in God, then the answer is simply God knows more. If not, you might need to approach the issue in a more rational manner, instead of just scratch the surface and then dismiss religion entirely.
There are calls to violence for the sake of Islam in the Quran. These verses are among the last to be revealed and thereby are considered to overrule earlier verses (the concept of abrogation in Islam is known as "naskh"[2]). This is in stark contrast to Christianity, where Jesus abrogated the Old Covenant (i.e. the Jewish laws that contain most of the barbarism that people love to quote) with the New Covenant (hence the names). This view has been held in Christianity pretty much from its inception and is what the vast majority of Christians believe[3].
Two oft-cited examples from the Quran:
>And when the sacred months have passed, then kill the polytheists wherever you find them and capture them and besiege them and sit in wait for them at every place of ambush. But if they should repent, establish prayer, and give zakah, let them [go] on their way. Indeed, Allah is Forgiving and Merciful.[0]
>Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given the Scripture - [fight] until they give the jizyah willingly while they are humbled.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naskh_%28tafsir%29
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_views_on_the_Old_Cov...
(Note : I say "cite", which is not a copyright viloation)
> obfsproxy is a tool that attempts to circumvent censorship, by transforming the Tor traffic between the client and the bridge. This way, censors, who usually monitor traffic between the client and the bridge, will see innocent-looking transformed traffic instead of the actual Tor traffic.
What concerns me is that all this money and rage will be spent in reaction to these tragic events that kill either less than 100, around 100, or around 3000 people tops. Earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and disease routinely kill far more and yet suggesting we devote effort to solve the engineering challenges of controlling our planet gets tossed aside as just as crazy as the suggestion that it's possible to control immigration with a wall.
Socialism kills [0]. Or a more eloquent and less extreme read would be "The Road to Serfdom" by F. A. Hayek
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Politics is so complicated that only a very simple model has predictive value, even with huge variance. I think a single axis order-disorder is the best we can do to talk in general terms.
>Socialist
Just because the Nazis called themselves National Socialists doesn't make them socialists. Communists and socialists were the first the Nazis sent to concentration camps.
Communists and socialists have a long histories of bloody internecine conflicts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history
You'd have to be somewhat detached from the historical record to seriously suggest that all of these, or even a majority, were the result of socialism.
Proof?
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism:
>Socialism is a social and economic system characterised by social ownership and democratic control of the means of production
Given that the Nazis privatized a lot of publicly owned companies such as the Deutsche Bank and the Deutsche Reichsbahn, I don't think the Nazis were socialists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Nazi_Germany has more on Hitler's economic views.
It's just that some RW people love to distort the reality to score cheap political points.
Abolishing capital income, confiscation of war profits, nationalization of all trusts, a generous increase in old age pensions, communalization of large stores, nationalization and redistribution of farmland and nationalization of schools.
http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/riseofhitler/25points....
Whether this meets your definition of "socialism" is mainly a function of how narrowly you define the word. But they were certainly a very economically left wing party.