Archive for the 'politics' category

How far is far enough?

Aug 19 2010 Published by brian under politics

I’ve been watching the growing debate over the proposed Park51 Islamic center in New York (referred to as the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque”, even though it’s not at Ground Zero and it’s not a mosque) for some time now. And I’ve noticed that recently it’s begun to look as though, once again, we’re going to be compromising on civil rights in order to make an uncomfortable issue go away.

For example, President Obama first defended the right to build the center there, then backed off from the question of whether it should be built there. And now, New York governor David Paterson is now suggesting it should be built further from the World Trade Center site–in the name of compromise, of course.

I have a question: How far is far enough? Just what distance from the site would the center have to relocate to in order to make everyone comfortable? A mile? Two? A hundred?

Perhaps the opponents of the center would be so good as to draw us a map, showing the exact perimeter of the exclusion zone around the WTC. That would help.

Oh, wait. There’s already a mosque four blocks away, and it’s been there forever. Who knows what they’re getting up to in there. I guess they’ll have to move too.

In fact, while we’re at it, no Muslims should be allowed to live anywhere near, either. You never know, they might be practicing Islam in their homes. Can’t have that. Maybe we should just move them somewhere, so we can all be comfortable. I hear there’s a place called Manzanar that’s vacant at the moment.

After all, we can’t let a pesky thing like the First Amendment get in the way of everyone’s peace of mind, right?

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Busting out all over.

Feb 04 2010 Published by brian under politics

So here’s a fun little thought to take with you the next time you fly: British intelligence has found that al-Qaeda has started hiding explosives in breast implants:

Women suicide bombers recruited by al-Qaida are known to have had the explosives inserted in their breasts under techniques similar to breast enhancing surgery.
…
“Properly inserted the implant would be virtually impossible to detect by the usual airport scanning machines. You would need to subject a suspect to a sophisticated X-ray.”

To me, this brings to mind the old line about better mousetraps only leading to better mice. Perhaps, instead of trying ever-more-desperately to defeat the ingenuity of the people who want to kill us, we might try giving them fewer reasons to want to kill us?

Just a thought. But then, I’m a liberal, so what do I know?

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Collateral damage?

Aug 07 2009 Published by brian under politics, technology, web 2.0

So, word is spreading that the DOS attacks on Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal yesterday (still causing problems today) were apparently targeted against a single individual: a Georgian blogger calling himself cyxymu. Since cyxymu generally writes nasty things about Russia, speculation is rife that the sites were attacked by the Russian government to shut him up.

If this is true, then it’s fairly important. After all, these are sites used by hundreds of millions of people every day. Including Russians. That somebody wouldn’t think twice about taking down a significant chunk of the Internet to go after a single blogger–and somebody who’s not particularly well known, at that–is disturbing, and it does not bode well for the future.

There have been rumors for quite a long time that the cracker underground has a kind of “gentlemen’s agreement” where the Internet is concerned: that, while they’re capable of shutting it down, it’s so important to society–and to they themselves–that they would be shooting themselves in the foot. Essentially, an online version of Mutually Assured Destruction. I have no idea if this is true, but it sounds plausible to me.

But now, if this scenario is true, we have a major world government that is perfectly willing and able to cripple their own citizens’ online capabilities in order to silence one dissident. In other words, they don’t see themselves as being bound by any such scruples about preserving the Internet for themselves or their opponents.

This is going to be seen as a watershed event, I think. But who knows where it’s going to lead.

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