Politics '11: Keeping up with the Xornses

[Hunter Sopko]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101206/ap_on_sc/climate_disappearing_nations

Interesting article (if slightly vague) about the potential legal implications of nations that physically disappear due to climate change.

[Dunefar]

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/12/06/104788/wikileaks-swiss-bank-freezes-julian.html

Swiss bank freezes Assange's assets because...he's not a Swiss resident.  If that doesn't fail the laugh test, I don't know what does.  I am shocked, shocked! to find that one of our clients is not residing in Switzerland!

I dunno, this kind of stuff really bothers me.  You can't abuse the law and treat someone different based on something else they did.  I don't care if that jaywalker was Hitler, if no one ever gets busted for jaywalking, there's no reason he should, either.

Query: Do you feel what happened here is an injustice? Do you feel it was wrong?

Emphasis on making that two distinct questions.

[NotMiki]

do you mean the release of the material in the first place or Assange's persecution? (leaving out the sexual assault charges for now because I don't know enough to say if he's being treated like your average international suspect or is getting special attention).

I have mixed feelings about the release.  As a citizen of America it bothers me; as a citizen of the world I don't care a bit.

Anyway, what you're getting at with your two questions is the difference between the process and the result, right?  Bad process = unjust, bad result = wrong.  I believe that an abuse of process almost always leads to a bad result, and that Assange's treatment by the bank is both (but it's only wrong because it's unjust.)

There are times when injustice can lead to a good result.  It's not impossible.  But I still have misgivings about it.

[Lady Door]

I dunno, this kind of stuff really bothers me.  You can't abuse the law and treat someone different based on something else they did.  I don't care if that jaywalker was Hitler, if no one ever gets busted for jaywalking, there's no reason he should, either.

Isn't that kind of selective application exactly the way things work, though? In theory it shouldn't, of course, but in practice people who did shitty things and/or are douchebags tend to get every technicality thrown at them. In a similar vein, there are plenty of law breaking activities that don't in and of themselves warrant action (eg, jaywalking, carpool lane violations, etc.), but end up being "plus one" if anything ELSE happens ("Hey, you were speeding, and oh by the way you were also violating the carpool lane minimum").

For what it's worth, I agree, it sucks. Being a pariah sucks. But hey, man, dude HAD to have seen that coming. He's messing with governments. Governments do what governments do best - screwing people.

[Grefter]

It is a little more disturbing here in that it is the Swiss government since they have that whole image of neutrality.

[NotMiki]

Isn't that kind of selective application exactly the way things work, though? In theory it shouldn't, of course, but in practice people who did shitty things and/or are douchebags tend to get every technicality thrown at them. In a similar vein, there are plenty of law breaking activities that don't in and of themselves warrant action (eg, jaywalking, carpool lane violations, etc.), but end up being "plus one" if anything ELSE happens ("Hey, you were speeding, and oh by the way you were also violating the carpool lane minimum").

I think the offense plus one kind of thing is different, because there you're talking about something that the person was doing at the same time as the "real" offense that's closely related to it.  I think of it as "aggravated speeding" or something like that.  Looking at someone who you just caught doing something wrong and asking whether they're doing anything else wrong in conjunction with it is different from looking at someone who you've specifically selected and asking if they've done anything wrong at all. (there's certainly a lot of gray area here in real life, though.  pretextual stops for traffic violations when what the cops really want to do is check the car for drugs happen all the time, and they're completely legal in most states.)

It is a little more disturbing here in that it is the Swiss government since they have that whole image of neutrality.

Maybe.  I have an extremely low opinion of Swiss neutrality to begin with.  Swiss neutrality mostly means acting as a tax haven for people evading US taxes that the rest of us aren't rich and unscrupulous enough to avoid, continuing to protect the assets and reputations of ex-Nazis, and refusing to extradite Roman Polanski to the US on some of the flimsiest bullshit legal reasoning you will ever see.  In short, Swiss neutrality is a passive-aggressive weapon the Swiss use to fuck with the US when we're actually trying to do some good and feel smug superiority at the same time.

I can't stress this enough: fuck Switzerland.

[Lady Door]

I think the offense plus one kind of thing is different, because there you're talking about something that the person was doing at the same time as the "real" offense that's closely related to it.  I think of it as "aggravated speeding" or something like that.  Looking at someone who you just caught doing something wrong and asking whether they're doing anything else wrong in conjunction with it is different from looking at someone who you've specifically selected and asking if they've done anything wrong at all. (there's certainly a lot of gray area here in real life, though.  pretextual stops for traffic violations when what the cops really want to do is check the car for drugs happen all the time, and they're completely legal in most states.)

This is true, but I still don't think it's shocking that the latter -- "looking at someone who you've specifically selected and asking if they've done anything wrong at all" -- happens or is happening now. In fact, it is frequently (at least in movies!) the way that real "bad guys" get put away. You know they've done something illegal or capital W Wrong, but you can't legally prove it. So you dig into it a little and find something you CAN prove they've done wrong -- see "Mobsters" and "Tax fraud," for example.

Again, not that it's right. It can easily be abused, and probably often is. I just don't think it's surprising, especially when we're talking about the world stage level.

--

Ditto everything you said about Switzerland.

[NotMiki]

Again, not that it's right. It can easily be abused, and probably often is. I just don't think it's surprising, especially when we're talking about the world stage level.

Yeah, it's not surprising.  I just don't like it.  I prefer justice not to take any sneak peeks under the blindfold.

[Pyro]

A few years ago I probably would have been condemning Wikileaks and Assange along with most folks. But after the Iraq/torture/blacksites debacle that the last few years have seen? Fuck government secrecy arguments. If they are doing something relevant to starting another god damn war it should be out in the open. People keep screaming "Terrorist" and "Traitor" (this one really cracks me up) about these guys without considering the fact that this all comes on the tail of one of the greatest abuses of secrecy/failures of conventional media in the last century of the US.

To date there has been no report of anyone innocent being harmed by these releases. I seriously doubt there will be, although I'm sure people will shout that there have/will be without an iota of concern for whether their statements are factually accurate.

[Lady Door]

On the actual WikiLeaks front? I was okay with them until they started releasing locations of sensitive points of infrastructure critical to the US and its interests (ie, mines, telecom centers, etc). Endangering lives is a far cry from exposing dirty politics.

[NotMiki]

Fuck government secrecy arguments.

I agree where the Iraq and Afghanistan war data is concerned, but I'm not so sure about the messages between diplomats, for two reasons.  First, the release seems to be expressly about embarrassing the US, not because of anything the US did that we would have liked to have kept from the world, but just because we can't keep this stuff from the world.  The second reason, to me, lends credibility to the assumption behind the first reason: the contents of the diplomat memos do not seem to have been particularly newsworthy.  Certainly not compared with the war leaks.

To me the central question is: "do I want the US to be able to do effective diplomacy?"  and the answer is yes.  The US is far from perfect, and diplomacy is often self-serving, but I trust the US's goals for the world more than I trust a lot of other countries', so as a citizen of the world I truly believe that it would be better for everyone if the US were able to throw its weight around in diplomacy.  The memos' release hurts my governments' ability to do that, and I think, balanced against the relatively small public good of knowing that US diplomats think Sarkozy is touchy and imperious, that's a net negative.

Diplomacy is done in secret not because it's all highly culpable stuff, but merely because it's process-heavy.  It's a lot like dating 'in secret' so your parents don't get too nosy before you have a chance to get to know your new girlfriend.  To me it's not blameworthy or newsworthy that, for example, unrelated policy arguments go into decisions.  So what if now we know for sure the US paid off foreign governments to house Uighers from Afghanistan?  The public pretty much knew that already, but having it public makes it harder for US diplomats to deal with Chinese diplomats on unrelated issues.

EDIT: someone smart makes the points I'm trying to get at:

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/12/wikileaks-and-the-long-haul/
“Your answer to ‘what data should the government make public?’ depends not so much on what you think about data, but what you think about the government.”

[metroid composite]

Regardless of that, wikileaks has put out some indisputably harmful information.  Like "here's a list of targets that are important to the US."  As an isolated document--not like there were any shocking reveals in here.  The only people who would find this interesting are people thinking of attacking said targets:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jUIQj-jUsDX4I3QrdsITQ7c87BAQ?docId=CNG.8549d9b93537814e90de0a33a00a6b06.3b1



That said, some of the stuff being brought against this guy isn't even "oh and an extra technicality".  It's pretty much just BS:

http://www.crikey.com.au/2010/12/02/when-it-comes-to-assange-r-pe-case-the-swedes-are-making-it-up-as-they-go-along/

[Grefter]

I can't stress this enough: fuck Switzerland.

What does Switzerland get out of it?  One upping the US Government by being able to proescute him for something?  I am just not seeing the angle.  It doesn't benefit them.  Note of course that I said image of neutrality.  I am not nearly naive enough to believe the party line on that one.

Edit - And don't take it overly personal, the Swiss do it to fuck with everyone, not specifically the US.

[NotMiki]

Switzerland knows which way the wind is blowing.  They're not about to take the hit for him, neutrality or not.

As for the Swiss being equal opportunity offenders, that's true to an extent, but everything Europe does with Polanski is a big "fuck you" to the US, and our backward justice system that somehow thinks that drugging and raping a 13 year old girl is a more important character trait than making good movies.

The Swiss refused to extradite Polanski because, so said the judge, it was not clear whether he had already completed his sentence or not, and Switzerland doesn't extradite people who have already finished their sentence.

Fair enough.

Polanski fled the U.S. the day before sentencing.  Oh by the way, fleeing the country before being sentenced for a crime you pled guilty to is also a crime.

So yeah, fuck Switzerland.

Also, fuck France, who wouldn't extradite him, and fuck England, who, and this is rich, allowed Polanski to sue Vanity Fair in British court despite the fact that Polanski could not go to England or they would extradite him to us.  The British courts allowed him to testify in his trial via video, a procedure they invented to accommodate him.

[Taishyr]

The "list of targets harmful to the US" is... I can't call it harmful when it feels like such "durrrr" information. Why, yes, those places would be bad places to have attacked! I could probably have told you them with 20 minutes of Google searchings, maybe a bit more. They're logical positions/targets to defend or attack. This being said, I can agree this was probably best left alone, but... it's not some smoking bomb or anything.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Leakspin/comments/ejftc/09kabul1651_us_military_contractor_dyncorp/
I'm linking to Reddit stuff so you don't have to go to the Wikileaks site/mirrors directly if you want to look. This one is about the prostitution of little kids to soldiers and the US covering it up.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Leakspin/comments/ejjzh/09abuja671_pfizer_lawyers_joe_petrosinelli_and/
Pfizer fucks up a bit in Nigeria. Again, covered up.


---

Basically I just can't bother with the government idiocy at this point. I support Wikileaks, honestly, even if Julian Assange deserves a swirlie.

Also uh, I can't blame Wikileaks for releasing any of this shit when it's Bradley Manning that gave everything to them, and uh, it's like 200,000 cables, expecting them to pinpoint and remove any of them is kinda silly (not to mention apparently the offer was made to let the State Department trim through them but they refused. Inviting it on yourself, there)

EDIT: http://pressthink.org/2010/12/from-judith-miller-to-julian-assange/ <-- something I ended up agreeing with after reading through it.

[Shale]

Also, fuck France, who wouldn't extradite him, and fuck England, who, and this is rich, allowed Polanski to sue Vanity Fair in British court despite the fact that Polanski could not go to England or they would extradite him to us.  The British courts allowed him to testify in his trial via video, a procedure they invented to accommodate him.

Fuck every single thing about British libel law.

[Taishyr]

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/dec/9/exposed-tsas-x-rated-scanner-fraud/

Oh hey nevermind found the article on there.

[Idun]

I feel this post is better suited for this thread.

I'm closing my account with Chase in January. They're throwing bought-out Washington Mutual customers out of sight, out of mind, by altering term agreements and changing accounts to Chase Total Checking. This means that I'm charged a $12 monthly fee for having the account. It can only be waived if I had a $1,500 balance (um? I did), have a direct deposit check (does not include multiple deposits per month) of at least $500 (um, I'm not full time) or if I pay $25 in service fees (which does not include my annual membership fee for the Rewards Card). I politely told them thank you for the information, I'm just going to switch banks.

I've searched and searched. I don't like opening many different accounts (joke to come later). I've been with Wamu since I was 16, Chase for 3 years . . . so 7 years total with my specific account number. Decided on Bank of America, despite all the crap they're incurring with mortgages, as I see they're located everywhere.  . .  Which reminds me that I had an account closed as I never used it my freshman year (hey, I wanted a free shirt) . . . Hhhmmmm. We'll see. Anyway. Must customize debit card, their stock ones are ugly.

In lieu of this, I realize I am lacking a card with rewards! I don't consider my Capital One, one. So. I applied for an Amex rewards card. Surprisingly approved. Knowing my frugalness, I should be able to balance two credit cards. . .  Yeah.

Anyway, moral of the story

Fuck Chase and they're constant fucking charges on the poorer people! Fuck you bastards.

The end.

[Dhyerwolf]

Bank of America's service I believe is known as fairly demonic in basically all aspects of their business, for a warning.

[Idun]

Genuine thank you.

I still have time to bank search as most require deposits. This means I physically have to go to a bank. Internet banks just sound fishy, but I may research them more.

[Lady Door]

BofA is pretty evil, and they're just as likely to charge you fees for accounts.

Check into Wells Fargo? I'm not sure what their balance requirements and whatnot are, but as far as I know my checking is free. I don't always maintain a high balance, either (though I do have my FT job direct deposit there, so that may be that).

If you're eligible, USAA. I would do all of my banking through USAA if I wasn't so lazy. I seriously <3 them. But they're only for military and family (I actually have it because my grandfather was a member, and thus my mom was a member, and thus I am a member).

I feel ya, by the way. I was a WaMu customer prior to their merger with Chase, and I quickly shut my account down once I found out what they were doing to it. I have two Chase credit cards and I. hate. them. I leave them open mainly because they're currently where the bulk of my available credit comes from, and I like the rewards (Amazon and British Airways), and I don't want to ping too many new accounts at once.

[Hunter Sopko]

I've been using TD Bank for a while, from the days they were Hudson United (then changed to TD Banknorth, then merged with Commerce to make TD Bank). Love them, but they're only really a northeast thing. But they've expanded into Florida, which is the only reason I'm still with them. Not sure if they're in Georgia too.

[Idun]

Yeah, I've been digging into Wells Fargo. Currently, fees are waived if you get direct deposit, which I plan on doing. Either way, it's a $5 dollar charge compared to the $12 Chase stipulates. I'd bank with USAA, but I don't believe they're FDIC insured. Plus, my military license expired today as did my insurance (yay!).

TD Bank seems to be an eastern seaboard bank. They are not in Georgia though ):

[Idun]

I've decided on Delta Community Credit Union. Wide enough range, really good rates for later investments, online banking, no fees.

[metroid composite]

I do ok with Bank of America.  It is true that you need to watch your account for improperly applied fees, though--I've caught them a couple of times, but the bank was happy to correct them.

Anyhow:

http://www.gameinformer.com/blogs/members/b/sakabato24_blog/archive/2010/12/14/is-it-the-end-of-anime-and-manga-bill-156-passed.aspx

Tokyo bans anime and manga.  Well...technically not all anime and manga, but anything containing illegal activities (so no pirates, for instance) and anything containing "sexual acts which violate societal norms" which sure sounds like it would apply to gay relationships.  And publishers are apparently already reacting by telling authors they won't publish stuff set in schools or featuring school uniforms--this includes reprints of manga they have previously published.

WTF