How many historical examples of civilians being misidentified as combatants does it take before we question whether these strikes have all been drug boats?
Apple is the most profitable company in the smartphone business and, while their "unit sales" or market share accounts for only about 20%, Apple's share of the smartphone industry's profit is about 80+%.
If what you mean by "smartphone business" is neither unit sales nor services, I'd really need you to point at some specific report to understand what we're talking about.
>However, it outperformed a struggling smartphone market in terms of shipment, revenue and operating profit growth, in turn achieving its highest-ever shares of 18%, 48% and 85% in these metrics respectively, in 2022.
I'm not saying those trends charts demonstrate anything, just that commercial human astro-turfers or bot networks are no less of a thing than intelligence ones and it wouldn't really be a conspiracy theory to think McDonalds or any other company, trade association, lobbyist, PR firm etc, is operating a lot of social media accounts that could theoretically show up on a report like that if they were doing a lot of it from a specific place.
FYI, that investigation also resulted in an indictment—conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding; and conspiracy against rights.
I don't know who that is or what that means. I'm referring to the actual indictment filed after the investigation that those phone records were subpoenaed during. It's unclear if you're trying to say that phone records should not be subject to court order or just those of politicians.
The point is that just because the good guys got the bad guys in the end doesn't make it right or that it's good precedent.
I remember during the Fanny-whatever-her-name-was thing that went through the courts prior to Trump's election they pulled up cell location records from 10yr ago as if they were nothing special whatsoever and introduced them as evidince. Sure, all of that was done according to laws and process, but having decades old location records exist at all to be subject to government inquiry is probably something that's bad on its face and we should not be doing even if it lets us nab a few people who did wrong.
I don't know what you mean by "good guys got the bad guys in the end": the subject of the indictment is currently the President of the United States and the charges were dropped as a result.
My initial comment was a reference to the TV series "24" which came out in the early 2000s and was pretty transparently .gov propaganda to get people on board with or at least more open to the fact that the CIA was denying people their rights and torturing them and this was officially sanctioned.
By "good guys got the bad guys" what I am referring to is that the arctic frost stuff resulted in federal prosecutions. First off, you can't really use conviction as a bellwether for whether serious wrong was actually done. Federal prosecution is intentionally ruinous for anyone without huge, huge resources and even if you beat the flagship charge the laws are such that if they want you they'll still get you and they're only really constrained by political optics. Martha is probably the best example of this. And second, even if the prosecution is being done in pursuit of people who have legitimately done wrong (note I did not say "violated the law" because the laws are so broad), I'm not sure that prosecuting sitting politicians is a door that ought to be opened because due to the ruinous nature of of having the feds after you it basically hands a ton of power to the executive to harass politicians to get what they want.
This ties us back to 24 and the CIA because they were theoretically torturing people to "save american lives" and "prevent terrorism" which, while noble goals, are still not justification for going from "torture is never acceptable" to "torture is acceptable sometimes".
If I follow you correctly, you're saying that we should not investigate or prosecute crimes committed by politicians¹ because the CIA did something on a TV show? That's an interesting point of view.
I am skeptical that doing so would result in greater concentration of executive power constrained only by political optics—given that that's what we're seeing now—and it is hard to envision a scenario of executive harassment of the legislature more obvious than what we've already seen² happen.
Not to pull the Godwin lever, but the German SS went from being security guards to overseeing the entire national police force to running gas chambers in about 10-15 years. The function of an organization can change over time. The purpose of a system is what it does.
When a domestic law enforcement agency is spending 600% more year-over-year on weapons to point at people in frog costumes it's reasonable to wonder if that may reflect a de facto change in that organization.
Maps looks like a swing at "library of real world immersive 3d content" that landed on "guy air-tapping his way through a slideshow of bridge pictures".
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