Firearms interests have their own highly influential advocacy already from more than one entity, so it puts this argument in the "all lives matter" category of flawed defenses.
217 karma · joined June 5, 2013
Firearms interests have their own highly influential advocacy already from more than one entity, so it puts this argument in the "all lives matter" category of flawed defenses.
The people living on top of the resources may have legally relinquished their rights to it and the intact land it's buried beneath, but the drafters of those contracts have a lot of room and leverage to act in bad faith in order to exploit them. This can prevent these people from escaping a cycle of subjugation because they are given mere subsistence instead of wealth in return for their resources.
Legality of things like this are often just procedural facades to release mineral extraction companies from accusations that they are doing something wrong, harming someone or, sadly, indirectly enslaving vulnerable people.
This dismissiveness is the reason we need influential voices to speak for the user in the design process.
I think the takeaway should be more about what we can give to the average working class person who is probably more intelligent and motivated than society is willing to give them credit for. What can we do for them instead of grinding them down in undignified, barely productive poverty wage jobs.
Surely if you're taking the dry, deterministic outlook on this discussion you'd take this into consideration.
The last discussion thread on this topic had more than a few people complaining that Isis (the given name of the developer in the article) is overreacting and paranoid, which is a saddening response to see. It exposes the privileges and unfortunate circumstances citizens find themselves in because these agencies refuse to prosecute their anti-terror investigations in well-thought out ways, instead pursuing facile leads without regard to the external effects they cause.
We've even seen evidence that these agencies deliberately manipulate otherwise innocent people into behavior that implicates them in their "terror suspect" criteria, so it's hard to believe that anyone in this situation could be somehow too cautious.
More likely, I think, that those holding prestigious enough office can find ways to get around very high procedural barriers like this one by assigning the task to a secret service agent or other on-hand staff of a martial trade.
Personally I think we've seen plenty of evidence that those in high office might personally carry out and enable heinous acts of individual violence if the stakes are made to appear grave enough to them.
This is somewhat worse than simply taking from individuals because it implies a systemic breakage that someone is taking advantage of, possibly using political influence to keep that breakage from being fixed.
To your other point, we have in the past seen the media reporting these types of things in incomplete ways for fear of irritating their sources and losing reporting access.
I have the same contempt for these people as you do but if we always let off-context quotes, righteous as they may feel, go unchalleneged, it's a shame on all of us.
The context of the Mussolini quote was not uttered with a commercial enterprise in mind. Commercial enterprises called "corporations" were not a real thing in Mussolini's world. That's all I have to say here.
The word "corporatism" in this context is not a very good translation. It's a real quote, but "corporation" in Mussolini's time would be more accurately translated as "guild" or any arbitrary hierarchical group of people with common interests. Corporations as we know them (commercial enterprises) weren't a thing as far as Mussolini knew.
As much as I appreciate the sentiment this quote carries, it's just not applicable to anything today. Snopes thread about this:
message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=36218
I'm asking as someone who agrees with your overall point but is mystified about what made you post it here under this article specifically.
Why reward ugly hacks when it's much cheaper and better to solve the root problem?
Despite already blowing the whistle and turning unconstitutional domestic surveillance into a public discussion for the first time in, well, ever, to truly be useful to society he must accept your amorphous terms of disclosure for information that is likely forthcoming anyway.
Thank you for explaining yourself.