On my trips outside the US, the hotel laundry rooms are usually busy. Enough that many of the hotels show individual machine status from a top-level page in the TV menu.
Wow, that’s crazy, the _whistleblower_ and one other person were tried and convicted. Essentially just punishing the person that felt bad enough to reveal the crime, not the many that committed it and stayed silent. :(
In a nod to an actual reality that's stranger than you imagine ...
> the person that felt bad enough to reveal the crime
is considerably arse backwards.
To scratch the surface of that:
McBride had previously raised concerns within the Australian Defence Force about the dangers of increasingly restrictive rules of engagement and the nature of investigations into members of the special forces.
The ABC found evidence of war crimes and published the information in their 2017 publication The Afghan Files.
McBride was allegedly unhappy with ABC's reporting of his documents.
ie. The "whistleblower" disclosed examples of behaviour of the SASR and other(?) special force groups not with the motivation of disclosing "war crimes" but to provide examples of "stuff the lads do to get the job done", behaviours that were being threatened by kid glove thinking and internal policing that might have a bias, etc.
During the case, McBride's lawyers stated he acted out of concern about the nature of the Defence Force's “excessive investigation of soldiers” in Afghanistan.
McBride believed the investigations were a "PR exercise" to compensate for earlier public allegations of war crimes.
Justice David Mossop stated "the way you've explained it is that the higher-ups might have been acting illegally by investigating these people too much, and that that was the source of the illegality that was being exposed."
However his story changed and wandered over the course of time his initial motivation on record wasn't at all that he felt bad about the rules of engagement being disregarded, he felt that such things were being chased down too hard.
Wow that is insane, thanks for linking the Wikipedia page. To summarize, the thing he was whistleblowing was over-scrutiny of military personnel actions! He wasn’t whistleblowing the murders! That’s crazy and horrible.
Devils advocate and not necessarily McBride's argument but... does the "blooding" happen if "throwdowns" weren't already commonplace due to the over-oversight? Normalization of deviance creating a path for worse things? Once you are over there and everyone knows they have to do some amount of illegal shit its kind of difficult because the line is already crossed, where is the new line? Noone knows. I've seen this on much less high stakes scales and its a potent source of crazy-making.
Speaking of normalisation it's worth raising that as a former British Army major of a certain age McBride very much more than likely grew up with lashings of the Lance Corporal Jones approach to dealing with others: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhWlAKdlQp4
They did not stay silent . They bragged about warcrimes openly on a podcast.
Persecute the murderous fuckers hard and fast, but not publicly. This affair cooking up smells to much like another russian anti colonial sentiment cooking op.
Can you share a link about the podcast? I’d be interested to learn more.
From the Wikipedia page, it does indeed appear that the “whistleblower“ is no hero. He was whistleblowing over-scrutiny-of-military-personnel. He wasn’t whistleblowing the _murders_, but almost the opposite! Horrible.
Thats how they recruit- stir up anti-western sentiments by getting western self flaggelation conversations going . You allow the resulting volunteers/ dhijhadis / freedom fighters in as part of some chechyan warlords entourage and throw them into a colonial war in ukraine, where the Afghanistan war is just another tuesday in the Russian army .
Same playbook since forever. Those anti-gaza protest are going to give birth to radicalized cells too. Its free fighters, the wests open discussions just another self radicalisation recruitment platform.
Im all for dragging the whole shebang through all the mud. The politicians who parked the war aimlessly , against a non existing country. The officers and media who went along, the soldiers that filtered through and the psychopaths that situation called for. But im against providing the anti western coalition (quatar/teheran/moscow/bejing) ressources.
>But only the whistleblower and one other were tried and convicted:
Of course, what did you expect? Murder is legal if it's for the government, and, exposing your government's secret dirty laundry is a crime against the law. Business as usual everywhere.
I'm not aware of any government that rewards you when you exposed it as fool/criminal in front of their voters and the world. Hence why whistleblowers get the book thrown at them, as there's one set of rules for the plebs and another for the super wealthy and powerful.
And do you know what's most ironic? We're rewarding our own soldiers for the same crimes we hanged the Nazi soldiers for. Another proof that the legality of right VS wrong, good VS evil, has less to do with morals and more to do with whether you're on the victorious side of history.
Making a dent is possible, but to take on power you need other powerful people/networks backing you. Most whistleblowers don't do enough homework. They just want to dump things out there and hope for the best. That's never good enough.
> but to take on power you need other powerful people/networks backing you. Most whistleblowers don't do enough homework.
Doing your homework and having powerful people behind you are orthogonal. You can do all the homework you want but powerful people got in power and staid in power for playing for those in power, they're not gonna throw away all that to die on your hill with you.
You might think you can get away by playing one political side against the other for your protection and rally support, but when it comes to national security, military industrial complex, the ultra wealthy elites, etc, those tend to be part of and fund both sides so it won't work out in your favor as you might expect.
>They just want to dump things out there and hope for the best.
What's the alternative? Once you start "doing your homework" those in power will already find out you're rocking the boat and will lock you up under the usual $ESPIONAGE, $TERRORISM, $PATRIOT laws before you manage to send a text, so your safest bet is to release all info quickly to the public/press while you're still able to.
Time works against you here. The longer you're in possession of dirt that can get those at the top in trouble, the more you risk finding yourself "Epsteined".
If you’re blowing the whistle on the British special forces, you’d want to have copious contemporaneous notes referencing where official documents may corroborate your claims.
You’d also want to introduce your claims into the Parliamentary record; first step would be finding an MP who wants to reform (not unmake) the special forces. In this way you can play into ambitious underlings’ promotion dreams while dangling transformation resources for the agency you’re criticising.
> How do you get them?
If you can’t manage the basics of politics, don’t launch a political endeavour. (This is true for whistleblowing and entrepreneurship, commercial and political.)
> If only Snowden would have talked to a lawyer, I'm sure he'd be safe in the US right now
Chelsea Manning is out of jail. And Manning went about her business in about the stupidest way possible.
> Another proof that the legality of right VS wrong, good VS evil, has less to do with morals and more to do with whether you're on the victorious side of history.
I'd say more that "legality" and "morals" are not necessarily related. Morality cannot be imposed by laws, and laws aren't usually driven by morality. This applies to both secular and religious laws.
Your project seems to be the opposite of Hytale; only 5 years instead of 10, and you've got a usable, working product without grifting for investor dollars.
Yep he's more of a citizen of the world than an American, otherwise I don't think he would have ever been considered. It also helps he was held in high regard by Pope Francis.
If you're talking about crossing country borders, then maybe. If you're talking about distance traveled, I would venture to guess that Americans on average travel further distances. The United States of America has states larger than many countries in Europe.
Citizens of the world usually refers to cultural exposure and appreciation for differences around the world. I have never seen it refer to distance travelled, however I can see how some Americans can use that definition to try and change the topic
Are you under the impression that the United States doesn't have a diverse mix of cultures, or that people here don't appreciate differences? That's literally what the "great melting pot" thing is all about.
I believe the question implied "in living memory". Popes notoriously don't directly speak up even against atrocities such as genocides, let alone act on it (with levers that are most certainly in their control, such as excommunications).
Pope John Paul II was a crucial figure in the fall of communism in Poland, even though he never opposed the state directly - just the fact that he was Polish and that the state couldn't censor his speeches and visits and demonstrated to the deeply religious nation that there is a path outside of the the one dictated by the state that is credited with a significant contribution to the forces that eventually led to the events of 1989.
I felt the writer implied open source code was a bad/insecure thing, since they downloaded a zip file from some WordPress upload folder. I'm guessing the code was being made available to companies that "legally" obtained TM-SGNL.
They will suspend the account if you don't complete identity verification, though supposedly you can reinstate it if you disclose your personally identifiable information.
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