warmblood

I see the ACLU as an organization that isn't blind to all constitutional entitlements, and I don't believe they have any responsibility to be that. I see them as particularly interested in civil rights defense for the powerless against the powerful and untouchable, who are particularly antagonistic at the moment.

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.

I think people who clap back like this assume the indigenous groups were able to negotiate with full, symmetrical information and legal leverage. The article reflects history in this regard, suggesting that they did not.

There is a large difference in power and knowledge between these two sides, which is the heart of the ethics argument.

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.

Having a conservative politic is a choice. That person probably has a lot of intersecting workplace difficulties that go along with being the type of person who wants to police which bathrooms people use.

I would ask you why is this singled out of an article that covers a large range of ideas. Your mask is now off.

I believe that reliance on the hypothetical arrival of adapters is bad design. Most especially in the case of those adapters relying on a single proprietary connection standard that has the potential to change or deny compatibility in software at the will of the vendor.

To charge the device while using the audio output? That my mother can continue to use her card swipe reader for her small hair salon? I'm not sure what it's like to have an imagination that cannot conceive even one very common use case where this adapter concept falls short.

This dismissiveness is the reason we need influential voices to speak for the user in the design process.

This is a mostly incoherent comment; enough so that I can only read into it what your profile statement gives away about your inclinations.

Because the burden on your (so-called) average taxpayer of having a stagnant, debt-crippled workforce is greater and worse to bear in the long term.

It bears repeating that privilege generally sees fair treatment as a step down.

One could say that this engineering degree finally put him into the place where he belonged all these years. It illustrates that there are unfair barriers that prevent people from making themselves and their families happy and healthy. Giving them the resources to succeed and provide for their families is a net good not just for their own selfish interests but for their surrounding economy and society as well.

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.

There is a deep difference of power and control between the average consumer and a multinational food processing corporation. The argument of the burden being on individual responsibility you are trying to make can only be made if the consumer is not being aggressively misinformed about the limited choices of products available to them for the prices they can afford. The company in question has the resources to make their relationship with the target consumer a very asymmetrical one, and they are always positioned with more information and more leverage.

Surely if you're taking the dry, deterministic outlook on this discussion you'd take this into consideration.

That's fair. I'm just really frustrated by how long this has been going on and the institutional resistance to addressing it for the better.

This is terrorism. Given what we all know based on past events about how the FBI conducts their activities, there is no way any reasonably aware citizen can conduct their life normally after such an encounter.

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.

I am almost cynical enough to believe that a modern neoliberal president surrounded by hawkish advisors could be convinced quite easily to personally kill the keeper and retrieve the launch codes. I believe that the hawkish "at any cost" mindset of modern American politics distorts human empathy so much that it's completely within the realm of belief for me for this to occur.

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.