What_wonder

> For the first time in US history, white Americans are faced with the prospect of becoming a minority in their “own country.”

I was told this was a conspiracy theory??

> When a grand jury failed to indict a white cop who was videotaped choking a black man to death, black writer Brit Bennett captured this growing mistrust in an essay entitled, “I Don’t Know What to Do with Good White People”:

I'm sure the author will be delighted to learn that this happens to white people as well [1]. One would also assume the rate of being killed by police would be proportional to the crime rate, as every interaction with police carries some risk, and the rate of interaction with police is proportional to the crime rate. Of course we have to be careful when measuring "crime rate", as it's easy to fudge - a cop might let a white man off with a warning for jaywalking, but give a black man a fine. So you use something very difficult to fudge - the homicide rate. We find that despite blacks being 6.3x more likely than whites (including Latinos) to commit homicide [2], they're only 3.7x more likely to be killed by police (3.5x if only killings of unarmed are examined) [3]. I.e. whites are 67% more likely to be killed by police, per homicide committed, than blacks. The conclusion is inescapable - the police are actually anti-racist!

[1] https://www.dallasnews.com/news/investigations/2019/07/31/yo...

[2] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

[3] https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/nationaltrends

> We take our cues from what the buildings around us ‘speak about’. If they speak of grace and charm, kindness and light, our mood will be buoyant, if however they seem to threaten and intimidate us, we will feel humiliated and cowed.

I don't think this totally captures the problem with modern architecture. It's not that the buildings are threatening or intimidating, but that they convey no emotion at all - they're utterly sterile.

I have no idea why verification, or other technical details, would affect the ethical calculus of having our conversations spied upon.

If I recall from their even more previous statement, it was already E2EE, but that turned out to be a lie...

There is also a cost in not having your smart TV microphone record all conversations and upload them to the police.

The Crusades were also a response to Arab invasions into Europe, during a time when Vienna, practically the center of Europe, was besieged twice by the Ottomans, and the entire Iberian peninsula was conquered and held for more than half a millennium by Muslims (and Constantinople/Istanbul still is). Many border countries had children regularly kidnapped into slavery by Ottoman raids (or had to turn them over as part of the blood tax), then turned into child soldiers and made to participate in those same raids, so try to understand when not everyone shares your black and white view of crusaders.

Look at it this way - complaining about the Crusades makes as much sense as complaining about Purim, which celebrates 75 thousand Persians being pre-emptively killed for being "enemies of the Jews".