PROJET AUTOBLOG


Richard Stallman's Political Notes

Site original : Richard Stallman's Political Notes

⇐ retour index

Urgent: Preserve Medicare

samedi 10 décembre 2016 à 01:00

US citizens: call on Congress to resist Trump and Ryan by preserving Medicare.

Personalized pricing

samedi 10 décembre 2016 à 01:00

Online sales, with tracking and surveillance of customers, enables businesses to show different people different prices.

I protect myself from tracking and surveillance by paying cash in stores.

Debtors' prison

samedi 10 décembre 2016 à 01:00

Nicole Bolden is suing officials in the St Louis region for jailing her for being too poor to pay fines.

Child soldiers

samedi 10 décembre 2016 à 01:00

Dominic Ongwen was kidnaped at age 10 by the Lords Resistance Army and forced to be a soldier, then became a brutal leader. Was he a victim, or a war criminal?

Clearly he started out as a victim; the question is to what extent he later became culpable.

When children are forced to become soldiers, we can't hold them responsible for what they are forced to do. No 10-year-old can be expected to have the force of will needed to stand up to such pressure; few adults could do it.

If the same person continues to do similar crimes when older, in a predatory army that punishes soldiers for not doing them, I think it is still senseless to put that person individually on trial.

However, when a solider becomes a leader, and orders others to commit crimes, at that point I think person becomes responsible for them and cannot plead coercion.

Presidential war powers

samedi 10 décembre 2016 à 01:00

Obama's latest report says that terrorist suspects must have proper trials in real courts, and that that the Authorization for Use of Military Force does not permit attacking any and all suspects of terrorism no matter where they are.

Publishing a good policy so late in Obama's term of office is unlikely to restrain Trump very much.

If he had published these decisions in 2008, and put them fully into effect, the US would be more respectable and more respected today, and it would be politically harder for a subsequent president to go against them.