Some people have zero self preservation. I wouldn't go deliver something to a terrorist group for any amount of money.
I also don't think phone calls are the only thing separating prison from a vacation home.
Then, at the absolute most, those specific crime overlords should be restricted in their ability to communicate with underlings outside. The other prisoners certainly shouldn't be punished for that.
Give the prisoners communication with their family/friends, sure, but make it supervised personal visitation or actively monitored (also recorded and if necessary censored) phone calls, not mobile phones.
Prisons only work because of force AND information asymmetry between the guards and the inmates, so allowing unsupervised personal communications is actively dangerous and counterproductive. It's not just organising crime outside outside of the prison or arranging the import of drugs and luxury goods, it's also the dangers of planning a riot, plotting an escape attempt, organising attacks on guards or rival prison gangs, and so on.
And once you have guards on the payroll, the rules generally have a lot more flexibility.
A lawyer stole his money and blamed it on his friend and law partner, a judge, who the inmate had murdered (including his wife who was a shoe-in for mayor)...from prison. The lawyer snagged the mayoral seat after she was killed--for a short period until getting caught and sent to prison himself.
Apparently prison offers few barriers to conducting business.
https://www.businessinsider.com/high-cost-prison-communicati...
Just another example of absolute corruption and how our representative democracy doesn't work for us.
Alternatively, you could build the prison like a Faraday cage.
You just forking do not negotiate (except for the release of hostages, while ensuring that all other potential hostages are moved out of harm's way).
If you do, you can expect nothing but a continuously escalating stream of demands.
It is a fool's game - the only winning move is to not play.
I'm hoping that newer designs designed from the start to be inherently safe, and often smaller and more modular, and/or using different elements such as Thorium, will result in designs that can win, but they do seem to have stalled a bit
i mean, i can imagine large swathes of human habitation where society is organized around deadly force. literally one country exists right at the border, where cartels manage the economy.
Obviously there are situational judgement calls that can't be captured by slinging stupid internet rules of thumb around but this is Ericson we're talking about. They're providing basic infrastructure stuff that anyone seeking to run a state needs. That's a pretty neutral thing to be involved in. It's not like they are a defense contractor who were supplying the people shooting at the new regime a week ago. And in this case it was a local contractor so that adds a potential layer of baggage.
In some organizations it's also typical to throw the contractor and underlings under the bus when the project turns to sh*t.
Later the article says:
> But the report says that one of the company's partners "made arrangements" with IS to secure his release and let the company continue its work in Mosul.
So no, the person wasn't abandoned.
There is a lot of questions about the manager's conduct before the kidnapping. How the heck did things end up there? But first thing I would expect from the manager after the kidnapping is to find a professional to handle the situation. And the professional very well might advice the manager to cut communications.
Not to become a hostage negotiator darmy, but to hand the phone and the matter off to a proper hostage negotiator and army.
Not to just forking ghost the guy.
Ali's brother runs with the crew and will keep an eye out, something like that I imagine.
I totally disagree that Ericsson could be considered a neutral party as a foreign corporation doing business in Iraq. There is nothing neutral about doing business with a hostile foreign government. That's just not normal in any way. It's not like they had never heard of ISIS and were oblivious to all the Sharia law and violence going on in Iraq.
Oh piss off with the rhetoric. The Taliban did and does run Afghanistan. For a brief moment Isis was running parts of Iraq and Syria. Both are trying to perform typical state administrative functions (courts and rule of law, taxes, defense, controlling borders, etc). One way just way more violent and way less successful than the other. Neutrality is not a foriegn concept in the middle east. They just have way different concepts of "non-neutrality by association, group membership and history" than most of the west does.
Edit: What constitutes a state or government of a state doesn't change because we don't like the specific policy decisions of said state or government or because said government maintains power through a level of violence we consider unacceptable.
Yesterday a senior German politician floated the idea of reintroducing (or, more accurately, "reactivating") compulsory military service. It previously ran from 1956 until 2011.[0]
As someone else has already pointed out, pretty much all of this stuff can be viewed as shades of grey. Apart from the facts that war is awful, and that that despite that, certain people are happy to get rich from it.
[0] https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/killing-time-fo... see also https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/a-military-and-...
Also worth pointing out what the Taliban has been condemned for in the last decade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban#Condemned_practices
I forgot they also conscript children.
It does not matter that they are 'merely performing "typical state administrative functions". The great accolade for Mussolini was that he kept the trains running on time.
Dealing with such people is a losing game - they always deceive and always take more until stopped.
The only proper response to authoritarians, despots, fascists etc. was provided by the Snake Island garrison to the Russian destroyer: "Go F*k Yourselves".
And the same goes for apologist-type responses like yours.
If you have not figured this out from this week's events, you need to seriously rethink your life.
Not even close to the same.
The POINT was that "merely performing typical state administrative functions" somehow makes them a legitimate government.
That is beyond absurd
Whether or not Mussollini made or failed to make the trains run on time, these administrative functions, whether performed well or poorly does not make any difference - they make them no less a criminal or despot.
EVERY warlord needs to perform some admin functions, and it does NOT in any way confer legitimacy if they do so. Mafia dons contribute to hospitals and festivals, but it does not make them less criminals.
FARC, for example, never tried administering anything. But the Taliban has actual courts where they enforce actual written and published laws. We don't like the laws they enforce, but nobody says they are not doing it. (By all accounts, their enforcement is much less corrupt than what they supplanted.)
That doesn't make it good government, but it certainly is government.
The US went on a war with a group that was hoping for political aims. It was very clear about that, and then eventually went on a 10-20 year war with the Taliban anyway. Here is Vice President Joe Biden affirming that in 2011. Their domestic policy in Afghanistan is not terrorism, while their external policy needs to be reconciled.
https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/12/vp-biden-says-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/biden-afgha...
Try to find a source you happen to respect that says the same thing.
Subsequently President Trump continued direct negotiations with them, which never broke our "not negotiating with terrorists policy" because............. I think you're starting to get it. With now President Biden fulfilling the pullout deadline that Trump negotiated, giving their country back to them because turns out there was ... a ... group trying to fulfill a political aim - something I've avoided saying as to not dilute and distract from my point.
The US campaign against the Taliban required demonizing them as terrorists under the definition of terrorists which is simply inaccurate, this observation has nothing to do with their human rights record it has to do with political aims that they hadn't already have achieved, the US was required to leverage its media and general islamophobia that allowed for the public to not distinguish between distinct groups. This was successful, while on the ground the people that mattered had to treat them separately for diplomacy, which continues to this day with an outcome that isn't surprising at all when understanding why we shouldn't have attempted marginalizing the Taliban to begin with. Now they have Afghanistan back, the way it was before we got involved.
I'm not sure if any of this information is new to you, but ultimately this is purely semantics. The human rights record isn't a factor.
2011 is when I was in Afghanistan and I can attest that both Joe Biden and Barack Obama lied to the American people about the progress in the war during that time because they ultimately wanted out. Let me juxtapose my experience with Mr Biden's words:
> "We are in a position where if Afghanistan ceased and desisted from being a haven for people who do damage and have as a target the United States of America and their allies, that's good enough. That's good enough. We're not there yet.
To be clear, the Taliban is the only force we were fighting in Helmand and Nimroz provinces.
> Look, the Taliban per se is not our enemy. That's critical. There is not a single statement that the president has ever made in any of our policy assertions that the Taliban is our enemy because it threatens U.S. interests.
The only thing I can think of during that time that this correlates to is the fact that they wanted out so bad they were willing to make peace with the Taliban. The Taliban's guerilla techniques and crafty use of IEDs and VBIEDs were having a huge impact on US troops and were dessimating the local population. To the extent that the Taliban figured out that if they just bombed places we went that local populaces would blame us for attracting the Taliban to their area.
> If, in fact, the Taliban is able to collapse the existing government, which is cooperating with us in keeping the bad guys from being able to do damage to us, then that becomes a problem for us."
This is almost a complete reverse course in what he had just said. Basically, the Taliban is not a threat until they are. He's basically trying to coax the people guilty of a series of heinous war crimes that they can also be regarded as a political entity. I'm reminded of the whitewashing of the IRA, who shouldn't have been a political party either.
Human rights has everything to do with their connection to the word "terrorism".
Due to a third party, we went in to deal with the third party and used the opportunity to oust the first party. We took their state and designated them as non-state enemy combatants, colloquially calling them terrorists. That’s kinda messed up. It also didn’t work.
What's an edgy take here is your clear lack of understanding between the Taliban and the Afghan populace, the history of Afghanistan, and your ignorance to the definition of terrorism.
To correct some of the misinformation you're echoing:
> Due to a third party, we went in to deal with the third party and used the opportunity to oust the first party.
First, your speech is really confusing. If you could just directly mention who you're talking about then it'd be easier to track. I'm assuming "third party" here is the Taliban, who started a violent civil war in 94. [1]
> We took their state and designated them as non-state enemy combatants
It never was their state. The Taliban fought with the Mujahideen, whom are also terrorists, to unseat a democratic government. [1]
> We took their state and designated them as non-state enemy combatants, colloquially calling them terrorists
I'm going to assume in good faith that you did not know that at the time Al Qaeda was partnered with the Taliban [2]. The Taliban and Al Qaeda are bent on localized islamic states, while ISIL had global motivations, which is why they were partnered.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_Civil_War_(1992%E2%80%9... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_invasion_of_Afgh...
If this is something you are passionate about, somebody else should have attempted to deal with the Taliban, which is the future we are currently in.
As an infrastructure provider, it makes it tough because pulling out of a country is going to harm normal folks at least as much, if not more, than whoever is in charge you are refusing to do business with.
But that doesn’t mean providing critical infrastructure services to literal terrorists is ok.
Is this victim blaming, or am I misreading it?
Don't pet feral animals.
Don't run with scissors.
Don't wear a fur coat in the desert.
Don't drink bottles labelled "poison".
So, it should reasonably follow:
Don't hand yourself over to violent, hostile people.
https://today.tamu.edu/2019/11/19/what-were-you-wearing-exhi...
so, in human interactions, its always the person that does the harmful, nonconsensual and/or illegal action that should have the focus
You need the ability to distinguish between a bad social cliche like "short skirt, asking for it" and this.