Comment Re: Sanders amazes me (Score 1) 395
No, he would be considered pretty right wing in France, the UK, Italy, Germany, in fact... pretty much all of Europe.
Right-wing, or centrist? What are examples of European centrists to his left?
No, he would be considered pretty right wing in France, the UK, Italy, Germany, in fact... pretty much all of Europe.
Right-wing, or centrist? What are examples of European centrists to his left?
Please don't be obtuse, it makes it hard to have a productive discussion. If I used Osama bin ladin instead of nazi germany how would anything have changed?
Not much, as neither example addresses the main point I was making, namely that the HLP wished to engage in an activity that one could reasonably consider not supportive of terrorism.
As to whether we are personally at war with these people, we are allied with people that are and thus it doesn't really matter.
The Turks view them as terrorists and we have an obligation on pain of them refusing to cooperate with us to treat the kurds as our enemies.
Presumably meaning "to treat the PKK as our enemies".
Regardless, if we accept that they're terrorists then we can't help them. They have to stop.
Can American organizations at least try to convince them to stop and offer them advice on how to press their cause peacefully?
As to their objectives, it is dangerous to take their word for it.
To whose objectives are you referring? The organizations deemed terrorist, or organizations such as the HLP?
Terrorists are very happy to say that a box is full of baby milk one moment and then use that same box full of "baby milk" to blow up a bus later. So you can't believe their position outright because they lie.
As do, of course, states.
It is possible they just wanted to create political problems for their enemies by bringing in international authorities.
What sort of political problems?
As to quixotic political struggles, there will be reprisals from the turks and indians if they perceive you as helping terrorists in their own country.
Then let the Turkish or Indian government take action against the HLP.
I understand what you're saying, the problem is that I don't know if that is actually what they were trying to do. As you must know, the struggle would be quixotic.
"They" the HLP? Presumably "would be" quixotic because the Turkish government won't ever grant the Kurds an independent state, and the Sri Lankan government wouldn't ever have given the Tamils and independent state, except as a result of being defeated in battle?
What happens when that becomes apparent?
People write them off as well-meaning but ineffectual?
And what if they only engage in the process to waste everyone's time in full knowledge that it is all a farce?
Hey, if they waste enough of the organizations' time that they make fewer terrorist attacks, wouldn't that be a Good Thing?
Not that I see any evidence that they only engage in the process to waste everyone's time.
Okay, lets say we're fighting Nazi germany and you're going to run a charity in the US to send medical supplies to starving orphans in Germany that have suffered because of American bombing.
Do you think the US government is going to let you do that?
No, but that's a different case. Quite apart from the fact that the Third Reich was a nation-state whilst neither the PKK nor the Tamil Tigers are, and that we're not at war with either of those organizations (aside from being "at war" with "terrorism"), what the Humanitarian Law project in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project said they wanted to do was "[trainin] PKK members to use international law to resolve disputes peacefully; [teach] PKK mem- bers to petition the United Nations and other representative bodies for relief; and [engage] in political advocacy on behalf of Kurds living in Turkey and Tamils living in Sri Lanka."
If you want a closer apples to apples comparision... lets say you're helping the nazis file legal challenges against the US war against Nazi Germany... See?
It all applies.
Again, no; there is no U.S. war against the PKK or the Tamil Tigers.
Look, I feel for the Kurds. They should really have their own country. But our alliance with the turks requires us to not recognize the kurds. And the tamil tigars are not getting their independence this side of ever. So what is the point?
The point of what? Trying to advise the PKK or Tamil Tigers how to peacefully attempt to achieve their goals? Maybe it's Quixotic, but that hardly makes it criminal.
Both of these groups are more likely to get genocided then they are to get independence. If I were them, I'd keep my head down and not piss off the powers that hold sway over me. I might prepare... stock pile weapons... organize. But never give them any provocation to distrust me or oppress my people.
Presumably by "stock pile weapons" you mean "stockpile weapons very secretly", as if "they" find out about it, that would sure turn into "provocation to distrust me or oppress my people".
I'd recommend both groups be loyal members of their respective nations and stop fighting. It serves no purpose.
Perhaps that's what the HLP had in mind?
Look, you don't help terrorists. With anything. That's the law.
It may be the law, but, if "with anything" includes "with trying to achieve your goals with non-terrorist means", then, well, the law is an ass, and should be fixed to more clearly indicate what is, and what isn't, "material support and resources".
Oh my... do you really want to talk about the cold war?
Sure.
Yes, the US did undermine democracies during the cold war but only when they were seen to be allied with Soviets.
Seen by people with a clue, or seen by people who thought "willingness not to be hostile towards the Soviet Union" constituted an alliance, or seen by the predecessor to British Petroleum to be a bunch of pesky nationalizers?
Would it matter to you if I pointed out that a fair number of democracies were subverted by the soviets as well? I think not.
You are correct - it wouldn't matter because 1) I already knew it and 2) "they did it, too" is insufficient for me to overlook our doing it.
Would it matter if I said that the calculation was that if the soviets gained a foothold they'd use it to project power and undermine other countries?
No, because I'm not convinced that they would have gained that sort of foothold in, say, Guatemala or Iran.
The issue is helping a criminal element. That includes helping them by giving them medicine or helping them by giving them food or in this case helping them petition international bodies for aid.
The law doesn't stipulate that some kinds of help for terrorist groups are okay and some are not. It says helping them is wrong.
Then I, at least, consider the law wrong, if it says that help to allow an organization to attempt to achieve goals such as rights for Kurds within Turkey or an independent state for Tamils without resorting to violence is wrong. I do not think helping them in that fashion is inherently wrong. That's what was being argued in Holder vs. Humanitarian Law Project.
Good. Now we've gone from "they're all scum" to "some of them (possibly including Rand Paul") are good and trying but the Repubican machine and its operators will block them."
At this point we're mostly on the same page.
Ron Paul is clearly one of those good guys. And the Neocons controlling the R party machine (one of the four major factions) steamrollered him and his supporters (sometimes violently), and changed the rules to make it even harder for a grass roots uprising to displace them.
Two debates are going on right now. One is between working through the R party (is it salvagable?) or coming in with a "third" party - either an existing one or a new one (is that doable or do the big two have too much of a lock?)
The other is whether Rand is a sellout to the Neocons or if he's just more savvy than his dad and trying to look non-threatening to them in order to get the nomination. Andrew Napolitano, who knows him personally, says he knows him to be a genuine liberty advocate, and I trust A. N. on this subject.
They couldn't do it with iOS, but why couldn't Microsoft just do what BB did and throw an Android compatibility layer into Windows? Since from what I'm reading now it doesn't sound like these new projects are going to fix UI specifics, why not just say "fuck it", and put Android or Dalvik in a VM?
Yes, now those five poor bastards who bought Windows 8 phones might, at some still unspecified date, get some decent apps. Of course, even binary Android compatibility hasn't done a fucking thing for Blackberry, but like, this time, it's gonna be so totally different!
That has to be the fastest turnaround time for Microsoft committing to a feature and then putting it off to a later release.
"Buy into our platform, and some day, we'll deliver on those features we promised you."
How many papers can we find that have been rejected because all the authors are male?
I wouldn't be surprised if it had happened, but I don't remember reading of any examples. Maybe it's my forgetful male memory?
In any case, can anyone cite other examples (in either direction)? If they exist, it might be interesting to look into the stories.
If nobody knows how it works, how did the guy invent it?
LOTS of stuff gets invented without the inventor knowing HOW it works, underlying physics wise. All that's necessary is to notice THAT it works, work out some details of "if you do this much of this you get that much of that", and engineer a practical gadget.
As they say, most fundamental discoveries don't go "Eureka!", they go "That's odd
this gem
"... whether it is possible for a spacecraft traveling at conventional speeds to achieve effective superluminal speed by contracting space in front of it and expanding space behind it.
They've been playing at that for a while. It would allegedly work by creating a condition of cosmic expansion behind the craft and its converse in front of it, so the spacecraft is in a bubble where it's running slower than lightspeed (i.e. stopped) but the cosmic expansion and contraction regions behind and ahead of it each total to the opposite sides retreating or advancing faster than light (which is allowable).
I'm not holding my breath waiting for that to fall out of this - or anything. Effective superluminal translates to "Sending messaages into the past." and "Violating causality." if you pick your reference frames correctly. So I expect flies to appear in this ointment at some point: Like something broken about what happens at the sides, needing big-bang energy levels (and not being able to transfer them between the front and back so they're free), or not being able to set up the condition in front because the agency making it happen must involve actual superluminal signal propagation.
Nevertheless, an "electric motor" that works by pushing against virtual particle-antiparticle pairs (or the total mass of the matter in the universe, or of an inverse-square weighting-by-distance of it so it's mostly the local stuff, or dark matter, or the neutrino background, or whatever), instead of ejected exhaust, is just DANDY! Let's see if they can make it work for real at human-palpable, nontrivial, efficiencies and power levels.
It is a requirement that you know they're bad people. So in the case of your charity example, you'd have to show that whomever you wanted to charge with this knew the money was going to terrorists.
Actually, I didn't give any examples, I gave a bunch of links. In the case of Holder vs. Humanitarian Law Project, the Supreme Court held that
As to the particular speech plaintiffs propose to undertake, it is wholly foreseeable that directly training the PKK on how to use international law to resolve disputes would provide that group with information and techniques that it could use as part of a broader strategy to promote terrorism, and to threaten, manipulate, and disrupt. Teaching the PKK to petition international bodies for relief also could help the PKK obtain funding it would redirect to its violent activities.
so that even trying to help a designated terrorist organization solve problems without blowing shit up could help them "promote terrorism" and "threaten, manipulate, and disrupt".
Perhaps 18 U.S. Code 2339A and 2339B could use a little work here, especially given the chilling effects on donations mentioned in some of the links in my previous post.
If you think the system is working, ask someone who's waiting for a prompt.
