
Bah.
"My moral imperative to expose people with whose choices I disagree trumps everything else".
That kind of extremism is right next to bigotry in my book.
Five weeks after a man was cuffed by police for swiping around 10,000 records of women who registered with British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), the site remains under sustained hack attempts, the BBC reports. The man in question – 27-year-old James Jeffery from Wednesbury, West Midlands – was jailed for two years and …
They can "view" it any way they like. They simply can't ACT on it. As a society, we have decided that this is an acceptable practice, that a woman has control of her body and the right to decide whether or not she brings a pregnancy to term.
If they want to see this changed, there are forums available for them to utilise. From protesting to legislation. I would even (personally) accept DDoSes and certain forms of protest-style/DDoS-style robocalling. Childish, but nonviolent and non-invasive.
The line gets crossed when you either commit violence or you participate in the theft of personally identifiable information. Actual violence is unacceptable as a method of obtaining social change excepting under the most dire of circumstance. (I.E. your own government is committing genocide, sovereign nation is invading you, etc.)
Theft of personally identifiable information is right there in the same category as violence. That may seem nonsensical at first blush, but the sad reality is that the information has only to make it into the hands of extremists and then people start dying. Alternately, you end up with extremists perpetrating bigotry via stalking, employment discrimination, exercise of police/state authority discrimination etc.
There is a reason that our society has placed a critical value on personally identifiable information. Under many circumstances its release can get people killed. Dead. No longer alive. Not in some theoretical statistics but in the real world. Living, breathing, contributing members of society. Killed for anything from race to religious belief, sexual practices to “allowing multiculturalism” (shudder, really? As a Canadian who values our multiculturalism, and revels in the fact that we’re one of the few nations to successfully pull it off, the Oslo thing still haunts me.)
So they can view it any way they want. I will defend their right to protest abortion policy to the death, even as I campaign against their beliefs to the bitter end.
But they aren’t allowed to hurt anyone. And they aren’t allowed to steal information that can/will be given to other people to engage in same hurt.
Free speech has its limits.
And my personal religious tolerance ends at the point where that religion demands intolerance of - or harm to - others.
"which did not mean that all or indeed any of the miscreants were necessarily located Stateside."
Well quite. I mean, who would expect those wonderful Yanks to treat vulnerable women as easy victims to be viciously attacked? I expect there's several microseconds go by when the rednecks aren't thinking anything like that.
After all this is the country that's home to such civilised ideas as forcing women whose foetus has died to carry the corpse around inside them until it emerges 'naturally'.
Having lots of attacks originate from America does not mean all Americans agree with the attacks. But there have been many moves in the US to attack women's rights (mostly originating from extreme Republicans). For instance repealing equal pay laws:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/18/scott-walker-equal-pay-repeal_n_1434886.html
"Also, if you're going to make comments like the last para, cite sources."
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/03/12/442637/georgia-rep-compares-women-to-animals/
Ok... One state has repealed an equal pay law, that's bad, but it's not all of the states, by a very long shot.
One representative made bigoted comments, so what? I'd be bothered if people weren't generally shocked by them, which they appear to have been.
You are still representing all of one of the largest nations on earth as the same.
"One state has repealed an equal pay law, that's bad"
I still don't see how forcing someone to pay a woman more when he doesn't want to is helping employment of women (you need to follow up with "positive discrimination" laws and it goes lawyersque downhill from there) , but twenty bizarre ideas are orbiting in the heads of progressives even before they have eaten their equitable breakfast cereal.
Where to start. If people could pay what they wanted to, then all sorts of groups would be paid less. You might work in an office where an employer pays smokers less, or teetotallers twice as much as those who like the occasional beer, or Christians more than non-believers, or non-white half as much as whites (as really happened). Equality does not come from capitalism. capitalism, as much as I like it, is an economic system, not a system of ethics. It has to be tempered by outside forces, such as justice, equal rights, and prudence.
Really? You support paying women 25% less than a man for doing the same job? I'd love to see what you would do if you had a woman boss who was paying you 25% less than the woman in the next cubicle...
The equal pay for equal work laws are "positive discrimination". The laws don't say a woman must be paid more, just that she must be paid the same amount as you, all circumstances being comparable.
Paris, because I'd like to get paid what she's getting...
I am saying that in the current climate, extreme anti-women sentiments are likely to emerge from the US. There seems to be a lot of encouragement for such views in some Republican circles.
That is in no way stating that everyone in the US has such sentiments. Many of my friends in the US are appalled and horrified by them.
Apart from anything else that would imply that all women in the US have such sentiments! (Although as far as I can make out from this side of the pond a startling though still small number do.)
Combating such views is not likely to be helped by denying that they exist and that a large number of people hold them.
I am saying that in the current climate, extreme anti-women sentiments are likely to emerge from the US. There seems to be a lot of encouragement for such views in some Republican circles.
That is in no way stating that everyone in the US has such sentiments. Many of my friends in the US are appalled and horrified by them.
Then you really need to improve your writing skills
"I mean, who would expect those wonderful Yanks to treat vulnerable women as easy victims..."
"Those wonderful Yanks", without qualifier, implies generalization.
"... to be viciously attacked? I expect there's several microseconds go by when the rednecks aren't thinking anything like that."
"The rednecks" -- do you intend this as a description of people in the US or a specific subset? Your phrasing is vague here.
"After all this is the country that's home to such civilised ideas as forcing women whose foetus has died to carry the corpse around inside them until it emerges 'naturally'."
This is not even vague. Here you're directly ascribing the idea not to an individual in the country, but to the country itself.
Combating such views is not likely to be helped by denying that they exist and that a large number of people hold them.
Nobody here is denying that those views exist. As for a large number of people holding those views, how large? In relation to what? Are these people concentrated in specific areas? Do they share common educational heritage?
Combating such views is directly hindered by vague, general statements about the sources and causes of them.
This article may be of interest to some of the feminists on here, who are doing a great job of defending democracy :-
http://jezebel.com/5887627/the-ten-scariest-places-in-america-to-have-ladyparts
With states governments from coast to coast working tirelessly to make sure no woman has sex for pleasure without suffering the consequences of blessed, precious motherhood, it may be tempting to believe that if you have a uterus, the entire country has become hostile territory. Well, we've got good news and bad news: The good news is that wherever you are, things could probably be much worse for your ladyparts. Unless, that is, you live in one of the ten scariest places to have ladyparts. The bad news is that these ten places exist.....
Yep I'd like to see our completely fair, equal and balanced extradition treaty exercised in this case too. I'd like to see how the US responds to an extradition request on ≈2500 US citizens.
Oh, an IP address may not be an accurate identifier for a specific person you say... really?
Well so tell your government to find out who did it and request their extradition. It's not like anyone here would give a fuck, really. In fact, Obama would probably have the extradition proceedings expedited, because he could make quite a bit of political capital out of it in this, an election year.
I'm pretty sure neither country would want to deal with processing 2,500 hundred people at once but I think a bigger underlying issue is does the UK government want the US to extradite criminals? In most cases the punishment in the US will be more severe and it would be considerably cheaper for the UK to make a request for the US to investigate and prosecute on their own. I'd be willing to bet that the US would more often than not be willing to arrest for the sake of international relations if the UK applied any real pressure.
How many will be extradited to the UK under that treaty to face charges of hacking here?
I don't believe the current active extradition treaty covers numbers of any form. I believe it's still limited to people. Still, recent moves in the US regarding phone number portability do give hope that, someday, we may be able to transfer such rogue IP addresses and hold them accountable for their role in facilitating these heinous crimes.
I walk past the Marie Stopes clinic in London every morning, and there are always a couple of people both men and women with pictures, stroking their rosary beads and crucifixes. Easy to be smug and sanctimonious when you're preaching from your book of fairy stories and your lovely safe position, how about you put yourself in the position of frightened, vulnerable woman who simply wants someone to talk about her choices on a situation she may not have even had a choice in? Not all abortions are simply people forgetting to be careful and simply going out and getting laid without thinking straight. What about domestic abuse, stranger-rape and lack of education of available family planning options?
According to the extreme anti-choice zealots, NOTHING justifies allowing a woman to get an abortion... not stranger rape, not domestic abuse, not even death of the fetus... the woman MUST carry it to term no matter what. Once the fetus is born and becomes a child, the anti-choice zealots wash their hands of any responsibility for raising the child.
Some of them are so extreme as to simply refuse to pay child support for their own child(ren). One US Congressman owes over $100,000 in unpaid child support to his first wife, the mother of his (3-5) children, and as long as he holds onto his seat in Congress, he apparently can't even have his wages attached to pay the support... He simply says he can't afford to pay the support when he's only getting paid $175,000 a year.... Now that the story has become public knowledge in his state, I sincerely hope his time in Congress will end with the November election...
Fail, because the jerk is a total failure in life.
Do you ever notice that those lunatic religious sorts who hurl abuse at people in the streets get "bless" and a hail mary pass on their bigotry but people asking for fair and equitable and reasonable treatment from society are accused of "PUSHING IT INTO FACES" like feminism and lgbt rights, neither of which is pushy at all yet always heralded as so while religious nutters who want to inflict pain on people get away with it.