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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
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A gentlemen's agreement to not build up nuclear arsenals to apocalyptic degrees is precisely what nuclear weapons deals were about; just because this sort of capacity CAN be developed, doesn't mean it should be, and when that creates scenarios that are mutually undesirable, such agreements are far from impossible.
edited 9th Mar '17 12:17:51 PM by CaptainCapsase
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Here's the thing though. If the CIA doesn't have access to the tools then how do they figure out ways to protect against them? You have to study something like that and know how it works if you want to counter it.
edit: That's why we have elections every four years. If a President is truly terrible that should, in theory, provide an incentive to remove them.
edit 2: Obviously this doesn't always work but that's why we need to work towards creating an educated and engaged populace.
edited 9th Mar '17 12:19:33 PM by Kostya
You know, I wonder if these CIA leaks by Wikileaks are done specifically to discredit an agency that is antagonizing Trump. A follow up to the manufactroversy mongering about Hillary.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanThe thing about hardware and software vulnerabilities is that spreading knowledge of them gives first advantage to the people who would exploit them. Joe and Jane Doe can't be expected to keep up with the latest security issues about every single one of their consumer electronic devices, and it's way too much to ask them to. Better to keep vulnerabilities as close as possible so that solutions can be developed and pushed out to these systems before the exploits for them become widespread.
Otherwise, what should people do, exactly? It's not like I can hack my own smart TV to repair its software. Turn everything electronic off and never use it ever again?
edited 9th Mar '17 12:37:55 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Considering Wikileaks actually had some of the code used for these hacking programs (IIRC), this stuff has already fallen into the wrong hands; obviously it shouldn't be crowdsourced, but you should absolutely tell companies about these vulnerabilities and encourage them to fix them rather than doing the opposite.
edited 9th Mar '17 12:43:34 PM by CaptainCapsase
Obviously, yes. First inform the manufacturers so they can develop fixes. But the NSA and CIA like being able to spy on everyone, so...
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Double Post: from Equiblog: Frank Hyman: The Confederacy was a con job on whites and still is
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Summarized, in the old South, the primary economic beneficiaries of slavery were the one-percenters of the time — white plantation owners and their wealthy sponsors; and there was a higher concentration of one-percenters in the South than in the North. Slavery had the effect of depressing wages, making the average white worker poorer than they would have been had blacks been compensated for their labor.
Just as they do now, the economic masters sold poor whites on the necessary inferiority of the black man by convincing them that, for blacks to do better, whites had to do worse. Does this bear any resemblance to the propaganda of today? It sure does.
edited 9th Mar '17 12:48:46 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Besides the amendments. We did. SCOTUS struck them down. (Civil Rights Cases).
I still agree that the US is well overdue for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission or something of the type.
edited 9th Mar '17 1:13:33 PM by CenturyEye
Look with century eyes... With our backs to the arch And the wreck of our kind We will stare straight ahead For the rest of our lives![]()
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This might be so, but patriotism is what it is. Whether or not a man's country is economically beneficial to him is often secondary to where he feels he belongs. Hypothetical scenario: suppose that Frenchmen were getting massively screwed over by their economic highers-up. That in itself wouldn't imply that the nation of France is a put-up job.
edited 9th Mar '17 1:13:53 PM by Jhimmibhob
That article is pretty interesting, since it intersects with a couple things I've been reading.
One is Upbuilding Black Durham,
since the author lives in Durham,
which developed a prominent black community
while under Jim Crow. But of course, no matter how much of a "model" community or behavior they had, inherent inferiority set a hard limit.
The other is Fear Itself,
which focuses on the role of the South in the New Deal and the Faustian bargain FDR had to make; Southern Democrats wanted progressive policies, and white supremacy at the same time. And as a consequence of things like the poll tax, which excluded poor whites as well as blacks, there was a small regional elite acting in the pivotal role in Congress.
The book is also pretty fucking terrifying because it describes how people across the world lost faith in democracy in the wake of the Depression, in terms we are seeing again right now.
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Patriotism is holding one's own country responsible for its actions. Loving it for what it does right, and working to make it even better.
Nationalism is slavish adoration for one's country regardless of what it does.
PSN ID: FateSeraph | Switch friendcode: SW-0145-8835-0610 Congratulations! She/TheyThere's also a psychological component to the whole thing, which is simply that having blacks be in a worse situation gives white people in bad situations the reassurance that they're still better off than someone else.
That one LBJ quote has been posted multiple times here for a reason.
Also, while we're on the subject, fuck My Country, Right or Wrong.
edited 9th Mar '17 1:50:18 PM by Draghinazzo
@Jhim: Fuck patriotism if it causes you to screw over your own economic interests just so you can stick it to people worse off than you. That's not any definition of patriotism that I ever learned. All that "Confederate Pride" was sold on a platform of lies. At what point do people become responsible for their own beliefs?
If you're claiming that they are incapable of intellectual rigor, isn't that a pretty damning statement? Why should we give that any credence in national politics?
edited 9th Mar '17 1:58:54 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
I can only say that however ghastly a place America might be in whatever hypothetical scenario we come up with, it wouldn't make you not an American. And whatever flaws it had in our scenario, you still might not care to be annexed or ruled by another country, however superior its economic model.
Of course (continuing our scenario), that belief/sentiment wouldn't be inconsistent with being clear-eyed about your country's dire flaws, either, or wanting to remedy them. Nor would holding both beliefs be irresponsible, or a failure of intellectual rigor.
Since when were people of the Southern states not Americans? Are we still pretending that the Civil War was a legitimate exercise of self-determination, brutally and illegally crushed by the North? Cognitive dissonance, ye are alive and well. "We went and had a war, so it must have been for legitimate reasons. Otherwise, we were the bad guys."
edited 9th Mar '17 2:31:25 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"And for the record, the South shot first.
Granted, Lincoln was essentially testing them, but "start a fucking war" is usually the wrong answer to that sort of test.
Oh God! Natural light!

Basically: the key to preventing a lunatic demagogue from abusing their tools is not to break all the tools whenever they're invented, but to refrain from putting a lunatic demagogue into power in the first f*cking place.
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