the_lego

It applies even more, as the 4th amendment limits specifically government searches.

Ironic, isn't it? The same people that will sing "They paved paradise to put up a parking lot", are also against any effective measures to prevent that turn of events.

A few tourists doesn't mean the community itself is transient. Even a great many tourists doesn't mean that, if the locals are mostly static. They form a community, and watch the tourists come and go.

This is like proposing to dig a bigger basement to fit more flood water. No matter how much you dig, there will always be more water in the ocean to flow in.

In the case of New York, it will never have "enough" housing - what will instead happen is, eventually, it will become so overgrown that it will be unattractive for new arrivals.

> Is that bad?

Yes. A home is not an economic asset like any other. It is the biggest link to one's community and people. Healthy communities cannot form from transient populations.

I think the best issue raised is: Why would I, as a user, want this?

https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/...

Should it? Such liability inevitably results in only "verified" content getting "promoted" - an extremely vague term. First it's the home screen, then related videos, then 1st page results for searching "cleanse", etc.

Soon any kind of user content hosting becomes legally impossible without acceding to some kind of government-approved (it will be private, but require "good standing") censorship agency.

> Just so we're on the same page, could you give me a definition of what a fake refugee is

Someone who travels across one or more safe countries before claiming asylum.

> it's beyond the scope of this book to address the history of the Islamic conquest to the extent that you desire

You misunderstand me. If the author simply did not address it at all, and left it as "Saracen influence/legacy", or "influence of Saracen wars/conquest/invasion/conflict/presence..", I would have been content (even with something as neutral as 'presence'). It is perfectly reasonable to focus on architecture, and mostly or even entirely ignore wars.

It is in ascribing guilt to the victims ("stealing", "debt", "Islamophobia"), that changed it from mere focus on a narrow topic, to lying by omission.

> And how do we strengthen the system?

According to the founder of the migrant sea rescue NGO Mission Lifeline [1], by importing more immigrants and giving them voting rights, to overwhelm the native population's vote:

If there had been enough immigration from abroad (e.g., by abolishing the visa requirement for Afghans and other persecuted people), and if these people had been given the right to vote immediately, (the German district of) Sonneberg would not be an issue today. Therefore: Open the borders! - https://twitter.com/Axel_Steier/status/1673019802523254785

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Lifeline

I see. So the only allowed anti-immigration position is "we want to stop immigration for no reason whatsoever". As soon as a reason is given, like, "there's too much immigration, we want to reduce it to 'normal' levels" or "we don't like the kind of immigrants we're getting", that position oversteps shared values and is grounds for a ban, regardless of what voters want?

> AfD never, ever, wanted to stop immigration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_for_Germany#Immigr... says otherwise - they want to reduce it to "small numbers of skilled immigrants". Granted that's not the same as zero immigration, but that's splitting hairs.

> What's the point of having a system of shared values if one member goes "Hey, let's, umm, [stop immigration]!" and your system can't defend itself against such actors?

Corrected to better reflect AfD's position. To address your point, the goal should be to serve the people, not the system. A system that persists against its subjects wishes is, by definition, tyranny.

> Sabotaging people’s private property is a criminal act.

That's what happened here. Refusing to scan without ink is sabotage.

> If it was from a private individual plantiff, then they have a right to privacy you can’t just ignore.

And the public has a right to transparency in the legal system. The rights are in conflict, and given the obvious risks of a black-box legal system, the right to transparency should prevail.

What does that have to do with allowing casual lies about history to go unchallenged? Let's say they do have a place - does that mean we have to whitewash the history of Muslim conquest? In other cases of descendants of invasions, they're made to call themselves 'settlers' and give land acknowledgments. The least we can do here is not tell lies.

On the other hand, there are laws against false advertising and (in this case) sabotage, where the action is illegal regardless of what a plaintiff thinks. If I went around offices and sabotaged their printers, the district attorney could prosecute me regardless of what the office owners thought (assuming they wouldn't lie and claim they authorized my sabotage).

This case is exactly the same. Don't be fooled - despite HP's name on the printers, they're not HP's printers anymore - they sold them, and have no more claim to them than I.

Tangentially, and orthogonal to the issue of if settlements should be allowed, undisclosed settlements should be banned. The public has a right to know what terms are reached through the threat of and with the sanction of the legal system. Because in a democracy, the public is ultimately responsible for reforming or maintaining that system, and how can they do that when they don't know how it's being used?

To elaborate: "nothing to hide" ignores the benefits to society that others, who do have something to hide, bring. Whistleblowers, various lawyers, activists, investigative journalists, labor organizers, etc.

Even if you have nothing to hide, you'll benefit immensely when, e.g., people with something to hide reveal your leaders are trying to goad you into a war under false pretenses.

To say nothing of how much the perspective changes if you live in a place like Russia or China. Historically, times and places where a good, honest person could bare their life to the government were few. How sure are you this period of relative beneficence of our governments towards its citizens will last, that you dare throw away yours and your children's freedom on the bet your future masters won't mean you harm?

> your antipathy toward the Islamic conquests of Europe

While I'm certainly not a fan of them, I'm not particularly outraged about them either. Wars of naked conquest were simply the way back then, and the Islamic world was not exceptionally brutal compared to others, including Europe.

My antipathy is towards those that seek to erase or twist this history. I realize the main point is architectural influences, but that only makes the lie more insidious - a casual statement most won't pay much attention to, and simply assume it accurate, like the presence of kilts in Braveheart.

> Don't think anybody even implied such a thing.

But they could have, thanks to imprecise usage of "equality". Therefore the difference is not of interest only to pedants.

> I think the point is that in Capitalism, the money flows to the top, the top then has the money, can pay off the government, sway officials, and get 'un-equal' advantages. This then destroys democracy, because the rich can buy the power and votes don't matter.

I don't dispute this part, and apologize if I gave a different impression.

> That is an extra helping of pedantic. People are equal

So if someone is more successful than someone else, since they are "equal", the only explanation is discrimination?

"Equal rights" is not the same as the broader and less-defined "equality". If this conversation is to go anywhere, it behooves us all to be very specific in which meaning of "equality" we are using.

> Against a backdrop of Islamophobia, Europeans are increasingly airbrushing from history their cultural debt to the Muslim world.

It is all so tiresome. A discussion of Arabic influences in European culture would certainly be interesting. Too bad she tries to frame the history of Muslim colonization of Europe [0-4] and kidnapping of its people into slavery [5,6] as something where Europeans are the villains, and that what little benefit they managed to extract (or steal, as she put it) from these hostile interactions indebted them to their colonial masters.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Andalus

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Empire

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Constantinople

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Vienna_(1529)

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Vienna

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_slave_trade

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devshirme

Thankfully every single one of the contributions is independently sourced, so we don't have to rely on their reputation.

> They are suing about the "exploitation" of the cell line without consent

You asked for our opinion. I will instead offer contrasting examples: James Harrison donated blood every week for 60 years, helping save the lives of about 2.4 million babies, thanks to possessing rare antibodies: https://edition.cnn.com/2018/05/11/health/james-harrison-blo...

Unlike the "exploitation" of the HeLa cells, that caused not the slightest inconvenience to Henrietta Lacks, he had to visit a transfusion center for each donation.

Barry Marshall deliberately infected himself with a bacteria to prove it caused peptic ulcers, risking his health, which led to their treatment with antibiotics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall

Some will selflessly sacrifice their time, and risk their health, for the common good. Others won't give even a handful of cells, at no cost to themselves, without claiming victimhood and demanding compensation.

That still provides deterrence, and safeguards against future harm from the same perpetrator.

Regardless, the chess federation is not being asked to act on pre-crime either, so in that aspect they are no different than the legal and police systems.

> without acknowledging anything in my post calling out the manner in which your initial response to that post abused statistics

I amended my original post to state it only refers to federal convictions, as you correctly pointed out, found the closest thing I could to non-federal statistics, to address your claim that federal ones are non-representative, cited statistics from the largest US anti-sexual assault organization to show that rape is handled comparably to other serious crime, and then added more examples to show rape is treated harshly by both society and the law, to the point that innocents sometimes are convicted of crimes they didn't commit.

In short, I addressed every point you and the original post raised, and addressed them using sourced statistics and reliable news organizations, despite the "rape culture" allegations being unsourced and unfalsifiably vague.

It would be more than clear to anyone reading this that it is not I who should worry about intellectual honesty.

Then robbery and assault and battery are also only "regulated", because they have similar conviction rates: https://www.rainn.org/statistics/criminal-justice-system

And I couldn't find data on the average non-federal sexual abuse prison sentence in the US, but for the UK it's 8 years: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2011/may/26/rape-sentenc...

So on what basis, other than "men bad", does the claim that rape is merely "regulated", and that the legal system wasn't (Shouldn't that be "isn't"? Or will we argue about what the legal system was like a century ago, and imply but not state that it hasn't changed?) meant to address it, rest?

In the UK, the police have even withheld evidence from defense lawyers to ensure convictions for rape. Does that affect the claim how the law is basically pro-rape, or is it completely immune to evidence, so long as a single rape can still occur? https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2018/06/05/basic-tenet-j...

A simple matter of faith, no matter how badly society treats accused rapists: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-46235634

> A famous quote on this is that from a woman's perspective rape isn't illegal it's regulated.

"Regulated" in the sense that the average prison term for [edit: federal cases of, see reply for closest approximation I could find for non-federal average sentence] sexual abuse is 17 years?

their average sentence was 211 months - https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...

It would be useful, it would not be ok.

It's still an invasion of privacy, and Intel has no business knowing I play (and how much), e.g., a gay dating simulator, Postal, Hogwarts Legacy, or any number of other games that either are or will be controversial, incriminating, or just useful as another data point in a personality profile.

So many of the devil's advocate posts justify it by explaining how spying on users can be useful. But the complaint isn't that it's "not useful"!

> bankers’ conspiracies [..] Satanic paedophiles led by Hillary Clinton and George Soros [..] “Conspiracy theories provide the missing link, turbo-charging an existing account of what’s happening by claiming that it is not just the result of chance or the unintended consequences of policy choices, but the result of a deliberate, secret plan, whether by big pharma, corrupt scientists, the military-industrial complex or big tech.”

The 2008 financial crisis was caused in part by corrupt cooperation between banks and rating agencies, after regulation aimed at preventing the crisis had been stopped by lobbyists [1]. Deutsche Bank was found guilty of price-fixing gold [1a], and Libor manipulation by colluding (i.e. conspiring) banks was a big scandal [1b]. The Guardian itself reported on it, and now they pretend bankers' conspiracies are unheard of?

Epstein and Ghislaine did run a paedophile ring (oh but the article mentions only Hillary and Soros - I'm sure none of the conspiracists so much as hinted at Epstein...), Iraq was invaded under known-false pretenses, and the US coalition's Iraqi order 81, that expands patent protection to seeds [2], is a naked giveaway to US biotech, which is largely big pharma owned. And I'm sure we're all aware of plenty of big tech conspiracies - from the general spying, CPU management engines that can only be disabled by government and intelligence agencies [3], lobbying for anti-circumvention and anti-reverse-engineering laws, sabotaging open standards, Google contractually forbidding manufacturers from making alternative phone OSes [4], Apple deleting protest apps from its (not yours) locked-down devices [5], etc.

I can't think off the top of my head of any confirmed conspiracies perpetrated by the military-industrial complex, though the implication that there are none is downright precious. In any case there are plenty of instances where countries have gone to war for reasons less noble than those openly stated. War Is a Racket by Smedley Butler is a good introduction, and I won't burden this post with yet more examples.

That out of the way... I find it surprising how in every single case, the article uses either unproven or false conspiracies, or unassailably vague terms ("secret plan by big tech"). Not one of the conspiracies the wellness people advocate for is true? Like the sugar industry lobbying to blame obesity on fat? The sudden turnabout of epidemiologists from demanding lockdowns and forbidding protests and gatherings, to realizing that some protests are okay actually [6]? Such an oversupply of conspiracies, yet we are to believe they overlooked all of them, and have fixated solely and exclusively on the false ones?

Or maybe the author is simply cherry-picking. After all, it would be conspiratorial thinking to reach for a more complex explanation..

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Job_(2010_film)

[1a] https://www.reuters.com/article/deutsche-bank-settlement-gol...

[1b] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jan/18/libor-scand...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Orders

[3] This mode disables most of ME's functions, and was intended to be available only in machines produced for specific purchasers like the US government - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#%22Hig...

[4] https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/14/22673202/google-south-kor...

[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/09/technology/apple-hong-kon...

[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/us/Epidemiologists-corona...

> The goal of open source, of cloud, of open APIs, of great documentation, etc., is to enable developers to build with less friction and more opportunity.

I thought it was to empower the sovereign end-user, to enable freedom in a world increasingly ruled by computers. But I see now that actually "open source"* was meant to help Microsoft/Apple/Google/.. build locked-down spyware-laden appliances more efficiently, and grease the wheels of corporate giants like Amazon.

*By pure coincidence, neither "free" nor "libre" appear anywhere in that article.