Thought for the Day

[sukumvit boy]

I can't get the link to the article to copy I think because the article is still too recent ,April New Yorker magazine article

[sukumvit boy]

Sorry. I discovered that since this is the May 3rd issue of the magazine it is not officially available for download yet.I will post it as soon as available.

[Stavros]

There are other accounts, and I believe the article you refer to i the New Yorker is a follow-up to the one that it published on April 19 2021.

There are other sources on North Korean cyber-crime, from the DoJ indictment linked below, to some artices, also linked below. One of them claims that what NK is doing is not just crime, thus-

"Nam Jae-joon, the former director of South Korea's National Intelligence Service, reports that Kim Jong Un himself said that cyber capabilities are just as important as nuclear power and that "cyber warfare, along with nuclear weapons and missiles, is an 'all-purpose sword' that guarantees our [North Korea's] military's capability to strike relentlessly."
https://www.darkreading.com/threat-i...a/d-id/1339887

This prompts the question, is this the kind of 'war' that we now face, if, as I suggested in your thread on the Thucydides Trap, conventional war is avoided because the parties cannot guaratee military success, and the consquences may not resolve the conflict between, say, the US and China?

Also, if North Korea uses computing as a weapon of war, as have Israel and Iran (on each other and their allies), does this pose an even greater threat if at some point 'smart computers' make their own decisions about a perceived threat and -if they can do so- launch a computer-generated nuclear attack -as Henry Kissinger claims in an article in today's Guardian -?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...says-kissinger

And presumably, if North Korea can attack the US, the US can attack North Korea -? It may be warfare, but not as we have known it -and who wins in such conflicts? And how do we know when 'we' have won?

DoJ indictment is here-
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/three...berattacks-and

Article in Foreign Polcy here-
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/03/15...-armies-crime/

[Stavros]

Further to the posts above, the attack on the Colonial pipeline seems to expose the difference between Cyber-Crime, and Cyber-Warfare, thus blurring the point I made in my post above.

That said, if the attack(s) originate in Russia, and the Guardian/Observer journalist can read the 'Dark Web' messages of the criminals involved, so too can the Russian Government -so do they not have a responsibility to 'take action' against organized criminals in their country openly advertising for partners in crime? This is a key passage in this from Naughton's article-

"So who or what is DarkSide? According to Intel 471, a security company that surveys the teeming cybercriminal ecosystem of the internet, DarkSide was first spotted in November 2020 on a Russian-language hacker forum, advertising for partners for a ransomware service. What it was pitching was a platform that “approved” cybercriminals could use to infect companies with ransomware and carry out negotiations and payments with victims. “We are a new product on the market,” it burbled, “but that does not mean that we have no experience and came from nowhere. We received millions of dollars profit by partnering with other well-known cryptolockers. We created DarkSide because we didn’t find the perfect product for us. Now we have it.” Not long afterwards, its software was found to be behind several ransomware attacks on manufacturers and legal firms in Europe and the US."
https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...-of-ransomware

[Stavros]

What puzzles me about the new Abortion law in Texas, is why, when she becomes pregnant, the woman loses her rights as a citizen, while the rights of the foetus become more important than her. Moreover, I don't know how some anti-Abortion fanatic in Oregon can sue a Doctor in Texas unless there is some information network or campaign that informs people across the US that this Dr is working in an abortion clinic, or that someone has found out that a Gynaecologist has had a conversation with a patient regardng complications in her pregnancy - a consultation that surely is legally private? I can understand the political aim of the Bill, but I don't understand how it works in practice, and does it not violate the First Amendment as well as Roe-v-Wade?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...aw-greg-abbott

https://www.rollingstone.com/politic...-laws-1164730/

[broncofan]

What puzzles me about the new Abortion law in Texas, is why, when she becomes pregnant, the woman loses her rights as a citizen, while the rights of the foetus become more important than her. Moreover, I don't know how some anti-Abortion fanatic in Oregon can sue a Doctor in Texas unless there is some information network or campaign that informs people across the US that this Dr is working in an abortion clinic, or that someone has found out that a Gynaecologist has had a conversation with a patient regardng complications in her pregnancy - a consultation that surely is legally private? I can understand the political aim of the Bill, but I don't understand how it works in practice, and does it not violate the First Amendment as well as Roe-v-Wade?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...aw-greg-abbott

https://www.rollingstone.com/politic...-laws-1164730/

I don't understand it either. There is a problem with the fact that the composition of our courts has changed and at the level of the Supreme Court the Justices don't have to respect precedent. Under previous precedent, states cannot ban abortion, they can regulate it but the regulations cannot place an "undue burden" on a woman's right to get an abortion. There are lots of cases that deal with what regulations would be an undue burden but even without analysis it's easy to say the Texas laws should be unconstitutional.

But what the Supreme Court thinks is an undue burden may not be the issue because they may overturn Roe v. Wade and hold that a woman doesn't have a right to get an abortion. I think it would end up harming Republicans politically but I'm more concerned about the immediate harm to women.

[Stavros]

It seems to me to be another nail in the Constitution and its promotion of the rights of the individual. It is to my mind part of the 'New Wave Fascism' that has its adherents in the US, notably Steve Bannon, probably Tucker Carlson but I am not sure what it is he thinks or if he just improvises anything that will upset people which is his job.

The situation now is that the people who voted for Trump and say they will do so again, no longer believe in the Constitution or the aims of the 1776 Revolution, because by definition if Rights mean what they say, everyone must have them, but that means people being equal, and enough White Americans consider themselves superior to Black, Asian and Latina people to make accepting this equivalent to giving up their 'God-given' right to live in America.

Belief in the rule of law now means, 'our law, not yours' which is why it was possible for Trump in 2016 to say he would accept the result of the election 'If I win', and carried this into the 2020 election to deny even the possibility that he did not win, and for a stunning majority of his supporters in and out of Congress to maintain the belief that the 2020 election result was fraudulent -because they did not win.

For States like Texas, their law is more relevant than the Federal law of the USA, and I don't doubt any challenge to this new law will be repudiated on the basis of 'State's Rights', which in effect now means that Texas need not secede from the USA, merely ignore it when it chooses to. Like the other Confederate States that have never accepted they lost their war against the US in 1865, they will be 'half-in, half-out' of the USA as presently constituted. There was even an article this past week suggesting Florida's Governor could prevent Trump from being 'extradited' to New York were he supboeed to appear in Court there, presumably for tax avoidance/fraud, though evidence is mounting of his Scottish properties laundering money, presumably for the Mafia.

Critical to this new position is that the Constitutional Rights of Women are cancelled when it comes to pregnancy, at which moment the woman's body becomes the property of the State and its laws which deny that woman the right to control it, even if she became pregnant at 13 after being gang-raped by her father and nine of his buddies. It is a cynical move that is using women's bodies and their Constitutional Rights to repudiate the authority of the USA in Texas, to assert that the Bible is of greater meaning, and to insist that it is only the State, not the indivdual who can make decisions on pregnancy.

And this, in a State supposedly opposed to Abortion, that aborted the life of Quintin Jones two days ago.

[broncofan]

I agree with the entirety of your post. I think you do a good job of pointing out that there isn't a principle based justification for their set of policy views. Or at least not one they would feel comfortable articulating. The rights they hold sacred are only those things cognizable to their base. The ability to exclude gay men and women from businesses, not the ability to exclude people from businesses who violate public health guidelines, not the right to abortion, not the right to vote if one is a minority, but the right to own any weapon no matter how dangerous to public welfare and how unlikely any practical legal use can be found for such a weapon.

If they are successful in preventing women from getting abortions they will only increase the cultural divide between the U.S. and the rest of the developed world. Unless such regressions occur everywhere it will end badly for everyone, especially women, but notably for Republicans who are harmed politically whenever people are able to clearly see the impact of their policy choices.

[Stavros]

On the specific issue of abortion, the question might be, how important an issue is it for most Americans? Is it as the term has it, a ‘deal breaker’? In the UK it is a minor issue for voters so it has little impact on parties, with the exception of the DUP in Northern Ireland.

This, it seems to me, makes the Abortion issue in the US more than the act itself, but the broader view that Abortion is supported by ‘the left’ and for that reason must be opposed, but also thrown into the basket of policies that separate one America from the other- climate change as an emergency, BLM, Transgender rights, the right to vote.

But your point about women and women’s rights must surely be the anvil on which this nonsense is broken? Does Greg Abbott oppose child marriage in America where most of the children who get married are female, not male? I am permanently surprised child marriage has not become a major issue in US politics as its moral content is more stark than abortion where there are medical and psychological, as well as political issues to contend with. And I would have thought it is the kind of subject Biden has strong enough views on which to act. So what is Congress doing about it?

[Stavros]

Two thoughts today-

1) would it make any difference to Congressional Representative Greene, to point out in her comparison of Jews wearing a “Gold Star” and Americans wearing masks, that the stars Jews were forced to wear, were Yellow? It seems to me her only aim in political life is to be as offensive as she can be, so as to make the news without whose attention she would be an insignificant nobody.

2) I read headlines and bylines that tell me George Floyd’s death has ‘changed the world’. I am not sure it has even changed the US, and while I do not dismiss the theme as irrelevant or wrong, I wonder if it merely acts as a symbol of the policing crisis that exists in parts of the US, while underlining the extent to which Race continues to shape social and political relations. To the authenticity of the movement for change that has emerged in the last year, one sees in the same timeframe the insertion of terrorist groups such as the III Percenters into law enforcement, the growing belief among people like them that the Constitution and Congress are irrelevant to their needs, and thus a terrible sense that these two movements are either going to collide, or some States, currently Texas is the model, effectively opt out of those parts of the Union they don’t like. It remains to be seen if the murder of non-White Americans in Texas increases in line with its Wild West gun laws.