an ominous comment

[Stephen D. Williams]

On 7/20/15 9:07 PM, Juan wrote:
>
> 	Hey. *Now* I get it.
>
> 	This mailing list has a lot of tor-tards who are apologists of
> 	the pentagon's propaganda and spying efforts.

Are you saying that the Pentagon is never good or useful?  Nor are any of their spying efforts?

>
> 	It has people who say that the NSA does good things (coderman)

They don't?

>
> 	It has apologists of the US marines.

You have never benefited in any way from the US marines?  The footprint there is pretty large.  You think they are somehow 
fundamentally evil when they don't determine their goals or rules of engagement?  Their job is to be a bad ass tool, the proverbial 
big stick.  It is someone else's job to decide how to use that tool. Marines don't kill people, politicians using Marines kill 
people. Err, something like that.

>
> 	It has high ranking scumbags from the CIA.

There are high ranking scumbags from the CIA here?  Interesting.
Is everyone from the CIA scumbags by definition?

> 	It has commie 'anarchists' who are offended by (and would love
> 	to silence) people who badmouth the marines' apologists.

Eh?

>
> 	And NOW it also has a google and cloud apologist. Welcome
> 	Stephen =) You are yet another reason to distrust the FLOSS movement and
> 	its bloatware.

FLOSS has bloatware?  Are you using the same meaning as the rest of us?  What's your favorite alternative?

Someone explaining bits of the world are not necessarily an apologist for those bits.  Trying to correct or moderate viewpoint 
extremism (see what I did there?) with more balance, or logic, or other viewpoints isn't necessarily being an apologist either; 
that's the kind of accusation that usually comes from someone slinging not fully supported barbs.  I do think Google is better than 
some other companies, but that's pretty weak on the apologist scale; I was more making a statement about a class of companies and 
how they should rationally act with respect to security.

> J.
>
What's your alternative to all of these things?  If you really are into security in any sense, you should be able to explain what 
security exposures moderating or eliminating those entities would cause and what you would advocate to replace them.

I'm offended in various ways by a lot of what happened in the past, often in organizations like DOJ, FBI, etc. that should have 
known better.  I would even say that a lot of government employees and contractors seem to have got away with a lot of things they 
shouldn't have.  But that doesn't mean that any of those organizations are fundamentally evil and aren't almost completely staffed 
by intelligent, respectable people.

Anyway, if you're still in the rebelling against authority stage, fine, have fun.  Good luck with that.  In the US, government wise, 
the people are the authority, their own authority in essence, it just may take a long time for that to play out in a given area.  In 
some ways, this is also true for companies, with some nuance.

sdw

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