I'm not a man, and I agree with scotty79. We are all different as individuals, and gender is pretty mush meaningless. Knowing that someone is a man, woman, non-binary, etc. might allow me to guess some things about them (if I also know their culture), but it doesn't determine anything and people are way more likely to make incorrect harmful assumptions than correct useful assumptions. It might be slightly more predictive than zodiac signs, but only slightly.
> The low median value of most forfeitures is in line with media reports about forfeiture activity. For example, from 2012 to 2017, Cook County, Illinois, law enforcement conducted over 23,000 seizures totaling $150 million. The median value of these seizures was just $1,049, and approximately three-quarters of the seizures were of cash (most of the rest were vehicles). Many of these seizures, including most cash seizures of less than $100, were clustered in the poorest parts of Chicago.
If that's rare, what is common? Do you think anyone else in Cook County, Illinois stole anywhere near as much or as many times as the government did during that period using civil forfeiture alone?
You're technically right that you're statistically unlikely to face civil forfeiture in your lifetime, but you're also statistically unlikely to face burglary, mugging, or any other form of non-state theft (except maybe pick-pocketing), but that doesn't mean those things are particularly rare or not something we should worry about.
Gaza is a ghetto controlled by a genocidal group at war with another genocidal group. It's an active war zone. It's not comparable to Silicon Valley. How does the 0.001% of employees being accused of involvement in the October 7 attack compare with the adult population of Gaza? How does it compare with the adult population of Israel and involvement in attacks on Gazan civilians?
I think you are holding UNRWA to an impossible standard, and I think it's up to those who think it should be able to meet that standard to propose an alternative before proposing its abolition.
A relief agency that employs terrorists is being held to an impossible standard you think? It’s an impossible standard to not hire people who kill, kidnap and rape?
And btw, 12 out 12000 is 0,1%. Also, it’s more like 10% btw, and 50% having personal family ties to Hamas.
The claim about 10% doesn't seem to say much. What does it mean exactly for someone to be a "Hamas/PIJ operative"? Has UNRWA been told who these people are and what they have done? I suspect we will eventually find out if there was any truth behind the allegations against the 12 (or 13) specific people accused of involvement in the attack, but I doubt we will ever learn anything about the 10%. The 50% is completely meaningless. People are responsible for their own individual actions, not those of their family members.
My question remains, are UNRWA employees more likely to have been involved in or associated with atrocities than the average person in the region? Involvement and association doesn't necessarily mean that they personally committed those atrocities. How does this compare with the average Palestinian or Israeli? Should I boycott an Israeli company if 0.1% of their employees were involved in the commission of war crimes or other atrocities in the IDF, even if they were fired/suspended when the accusation came to light, and no one seems to be able to suggest what they should have done differently to avoid hiring them?
so do you think that in a family where father is launching rockets indiscriminately at people, the mom will be teaching children about coexistance and building a peace loving community?
When you're facing an illegal occupation, firing rockets back is called resistance, and there's a reason it is widely recognized as legitimate.
As for how indiscriminate it is, hard to take seriously from someone who's defending a regime that has actively carpet bombed cities for the past 4 months.
widely recognized as legitimate? indiscriminate rocket launches at villages, towns and cities is a war crime and is not recognized ny anyone apart from purple haired 19 yo tiktok watchers, there is not a single official entity apart from Iran-proxies who see that as legitimate resistance, you are absolutely insane suggesting that
If we're not funding and arming organizations known for killing, kidnapping, and raping, I'm glad to hear the IDF will not longer be receiving arms manufactured in the US and UK.
Meanwhile, it's amusing the rape claims keep coming, even though not one woman has actually claimed that she was raped. But sure, it was widespread. Most certainly near the pile of 40 beheaded babies. Except, whoops, Haaretz reported the list of those killed on 10/7, and only one person was under the age of 3. Given the number of those killed by the IDF themselves due to the Hannibal protocol, there's a pretty high chance even that one wasn't killed by Hamas, who was more interested in military targets.
There's a reason all the songs go "lie lie lie lie lie lie..."
The original person said that this is standard for any organization. So that's false then?
Now you're saying that it's normal for any organization in a war zone to include 0.1% terrorists in it?
That means that the UNCHR, which operates in the same environments, has had 20 ISIS members among their ranks that participated in terrorist attacks? Nope.
That UN peacekeeping missions like the one in Kosovo just went around murdering a few people here and there? Nope.
It's not true that to operate in these environments you need to include terrorists among your ranks. No one else does.
The UNRWA decided a long time ago that it was easier to work with Hamas. That's just unacceptable for an international organization.
Also, accusing Israel, who literally left Gaza to the locals and forcefully displaced its own people to do so, of genocide is absurd. Israel gave Gazans what they wanted: autonomy. They then elected a genocidal organization.
12 or 13 employees in an organization being accused of terrorism or war crimes doesn't necessarily mean the organization is complicit in those acts, or could have foreseen the situation. This is especially the case in a region where such acts are common.
Did UNHCR operate in ISIS territory? I could be wrong, but I don't believe they ever did. The UN peacekeepers in Kosovo were not from the region, so that comparison doesn't make sense. Do you think it would be possible for UNRWA to recruit a sufficient number of people who do not already live in Gaza to move there and work for them, considering the rate at which UNRWA employees have been killed so far? You still have not said what UNRWA should have done differently.
My understanding is that the Israeli government never ended the occupation of Gaza in a way that could have allowed it to function as anything more than a ghetto or open-air prison. They forcefully removed their citizens from the territory, but did they ever end the blockade? Was there even a day when people in Gaza could import and export goods, generate electricity, or travel in and out of the territory without Israeli permission?
It makes no sense to solely blame the Palestinians for Hamas controlling Gaza when the Israeli government created the conditions that allowed them to seize power and the current prime minister of Israel has said: "Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas [...] This is part of our strategy — to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank."
And those elected officials are beholden to the highest bidder. In the
current system, the people who make CA decisions acquired that power voluntarily and seem to have acted benevolently in the past, that's way more than you can say about government officials.
The current voluntary system is also very open, and anyone can get involved and participate to a much larger extent than people realistically can in an electoral democracy. To me, the voluntary system seems to be better and safer for everyone who doesn't have a very large amount of money to throw at elections.
EU governments will be even more subject to pressure from the US. I don't understand how anyone could doubt they will comply with every request from the US government.
The difference is that the current decision makers only have power because other people trust them voluntarily. That makes them accountable, and it means a whistleblower can do much more to limit the damage by leaking the fact they are giving after to US pressure.
A government can impose its will by force, so it is much less accountable and doesn't have to worry about the consequences of its decisions nearly as much. There is nothing I can realistically do if I object to a decision by a government unless I'm a large political donor because governments don't need my consent to operate.
> the current decision makers only have power because other people trust them voluntarily.
Not really. Plenty of EU citizens don't trust Microsoft, Google or Apple. But there's no practical alternative. The government of an individual EU country has a lot more accountability than that.
They can install an open-source OS/browser and ignore Microsoft, Google, and Apple. There is nothing they can realistically do when they don't trust a government.
Governments ultimately derive their power from their ability to impose their will by violence. That makes them inherently less accountable than organizations that you are free to ignore.
Someone who doesn't trust a government can move countries, particularly in the EU. I'd argue that it's actually easier to avoid a given EU government than to use an OS/browser combination that's not controlled by US entities.
That's frankly ridiculous. Moving countries is expensive, and there are a limited number of countries in the EU and the world. If you can't afford to move or don't trust any of them, you are out of luck.
Installing an open-source OS and browser is free and the options are practically unlimited as anyone is free to create a new alternative.
> Installing an open-source OS and browser is free and the options are practically unlimited
There's what, two and a half real options? Even open-source applications wilfully cut off any non-mainstream OS (see the whole systemd saga). "Anyone is free to create a new browser", sure, but in practice it's now so expensive that even Microsoft had to give up. I've absolutely got more practical choices of country.
I have no idea what you are talking about. There are literally infinite alternatives because you can freely modify any open-source alternative in infinite ways.
No one is going to kick down your door and shoot you if you try to make a new browser or OS from scratch, like they would if you tried to make a new government, but there is really no reason to make a browser from scratch.
Microsoft didn't need to trust Google to fork Chromium, they didn't give up any power to Google and have exactly the same ability to influence web standards as if they had reinvented the browser. If they disagree with a choice the Chromium developers made, they can change it and keep the rest. The same applies to anyone who wants to do the same.
When it comes to certificate authorities, you don't even need to modify the browser or OS because they already allow you to add and remove authorities. The main reason people don't tend to do that is because they have no reason to. If you tried to start a new one, the natural thing to ask would be why I should trust you over the established certificate authorities. If your answer is that I don't have a choice because you have the backing of an army and police force that you will use against me if I don't, it doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.
The current certificate authorities don't need to threaten anyone with violence to secure their position, and they operate with significantly more transparency than any government I know of. Compared to governments, they are also much safer to trust because they rely on consent rather than force. A compromised or malicious certificate authority won't shoot you for trying to replace it, it has no enforcement mechanism beyond inertia.
> When it comes to certificate authorities, you don't even need to modify the browser or OS because they already allow you to add and remove authorities. The main reason people don't tend to do that is because they have no reason to.
They're already starting to make it more difficult. Look at what's happening with DoH where it's harder and harder to choose how your DNS queries get done and you get steered to CloudFlare (who are pretty low on my list of entities I want to trust) instead. Now that browsers have mostly succeeded in forcing HTTPS everywhere, expect them to start turning the screws.
> The current certificate authorities don't need to threaten anyone with violence to secure their position, and they operate with significantly more transparency than any government I know of.
Really? Can I make a FoI request to find out why a CA refused to issue a certificate to a particular entity? Is there a right of appeal if they refuse to issue a certificate on discriminatory grounds?
> They're already starting to make it more difficult. Look at what's happening with DoH where it's harder and harder to choose how your DNS queries get done and you get steered to CloudFlare (who are pretty low on my list of entities I want to trust) instead. Now that browsers have mostly succeeded in forcing HTTPS everywhere, expect them to start turning the screws.
DoH doesn't interfere with your ability to choose your own DNS provider. It only means that your DNS queries are between you and your DNS provider, free from the interference of your ISP and other third parties. It provides greater user freedom because your ISP cannot as easily force you to use their DNS provider. Nothing stops ISPs from offering DoH and some (e.g. Comcast) do offer it. Users may however benefit from using a DNS that's not affiliated with their ISP because ISPs are more vulnerable to censorship demands from governments. Usually, when a government demands that an ISP censor a website, the ISP will simply block DNS queries regarding that domain, allowing users of other DNS providers to escape the censorship. This may of course not be a long-term solution, as governments may be more likely to demand different censorship methods if fewer use the IPS DNS.
As far as I'm aware, no one has suggested that DoH should be mandatory. It is a sensible default that improves the privacy and security of most users, but a user who decides that they do not want to use DoH can simply opt out in the settings. Likewise, HTTPS is not mandatory either, and browsers will not prevent users from accessing unsecure sites. They will however warn users to make sure they are aware of the risks. As far as I'm aware, browser vendors do not benefit from users using HTTPS everywhere. They encourage its use because it is generally beneficial to users.
> Really? Can I make a FoI request to find out why a CA refused to issue a certificate to a particular entity? Is there a right of appeal if they refuse to issue a certificate on discriminatory grounds?
A FoI request is just asking the government to give you information. They will never intentionally give you anything they do not want you to have. FoI laws tend to contain enough exceptions to cover any situation, but even if you should legally receive the information, there is nothing you can realistically do to make them provide it to you. Similarly, you can ask any organization for any information, and they can refuse. The same is true with appeals. You can ask an organization to reconsider its decision and for someone else in the organization to look at it, but the decision remains within the organization. The difference is what you can do once the decision has been finally made. Will the decision maker try to force me to adhere to their decision through violent means, or am I free to ignore them and try to convince others to do the same?
The main difference regarding transparency is that more information is made public by default in the current system (what good is the ability to request information if you don't even know that the thing you wanted to request information about happened?) and that decisions are made by several separate entities that need to justify their decisions to each other in order to maintain consensus.
> As far as I'm aware, browser vendors do not benefit from users using HTTPS everywhere. They encourage its use because it is generally beneficial to users.
Google (which is to say DoubleClick), which funds the majority of browsers, has a huge financial interest in HTTPS. They make their money on ad tracking, and it suits them to put a moat around that; privacy initiatives help them by making it harder for any new competitors to get hold of the same information they built their business on.
> DoH doesn't interfere with your ability to choose your own DNS provider.
It may not make it impossible but it makes it harder. You need a provider that supports DoH, and your browser will ignore your OS-wide DNS setting. Previously your default DNS provider would be an ISP that you'd picked; now the default is whoever's most profitable for your browser maker (you might say you pick your browser, but there's less real choice there than there is for ISPs, at least where I live).
> As far as I'm aware, no one has suggested that DoH should be mandatory. It is a sensible default that improves the privacy and security of most users, but a user who decides that they do not want to use DoH can simply opt out in the settings. Likewise, HTTPS is not mandatory either, and browsers will not prevent users from accessing unsecure sites. They will however warn users to make sure they are aware of the risks.
They won't do it all at once, but they're making it harder and harder to access non-HTTPS sites. It's gone from a clear warning to a block page where accessing the HTTP version requires multiple clicks on tiny text; the next step will be to make it require a config tweak to even get that tiny text at all, and then they'll say that their telemetry conveniently shows few people are using that config tweak (because who could imagine that the kind of people who would don't trust their browser maker would disable telemetry) so they're removing it. We've seen this whole playbook before. It'll be the same for DoH.
> A FoI request is just asking the government to give you information. They will never intentionally give you anything they do not want you to have. FoI laws tend to contain enough exceptions to cover any situation, but even if you should legally receive the information, there is nothing you can realistically do to make them provide it to you.
Governments are accountable to their citizens, not just in theory but in cultural practice, which is what really matters. If you get a bogus response to an FoI request then you can complain to your representatives, and if your representatives don't respond then you can vote them out. But more importantly, the clerk handling your request knows that their duty is to you, not their shareholders, and will generally act accordingly. And if they don't, there's a whole culture of whistleblowers, investigative journalists, activist judges and so on.
None of that exists for a private company CA where they're working for their shareholders and no-one expects them to do otherwise. Frankly even if it did leak out that a CA had refused to issue a certificate to someone who they just didn't like, it wouldn't even be a scandal unless you were lucky enough to catch the right moment where there was a social movement supporting that particular kind of person.
It would be impossible for them to force me to blindly accept a government issued ID card as true, and it would be insane for me to comply with such a demand. The same is true here, I won't run a browser or OS that complies with these regulations and as far as I can tell, they can't realistically make me.
The problem is if companies like Apple and Microsoft that make proprietary operating systems are forced to comply by the threat of import bans, etc. That would make their less technologically sophisticated customers vulnerable to completely unnecessary risks. The EU might not think the risks are unnecessary because they gain "sovereignty", but that only helps the EU and their member states, not 99.999% of the people who live in their territory.
Ultimately, I don't think this will be implemented. They can scream "sovereignty" as much as they want, but everyone else has an incentive to resist, and it would be even more harmful to their perception of sovereignty if both Microsoft and Apple say no and the EU faces the choice of either banning 99% of computers on the consumer market (and still be unable to force the remaining open source alternatives to meaningfully comply) or backing down to foreign organizations after a public confrontation.
It's hard to say whether that would be allowed because the regulation is written in such a vague language. There is a risk that such a system would be considered to be a precautionary measure under Article 45a-1.
