> As Kartas' business in Tunisia was to present his findings on the arms embargo violations, other experts believe that the arrest is politically motivated, and that ownership of the RTL-SDR for espionage is simply being used as an excuse.
No kidding. The government is failing on several fronts; and is trying to gain popularity by making fake moves (like finding and arresting a spy). They did that to several business man. The good news, they released them (no charges, no evidence, no nothing). The bad news, some of them were released only a year later. They had no right to a lawyer or a trial during that time. It was "investigation".
This is possible because technically speaking the country is under martial-law which keeps getting renewed every month. The sad thing people are quite busy these days trying to find gas, milk and basic necessities. The interest on political and freedom-related news is way down from the first few years of the said revolution.
It is funny because looking at the pictures, some parts of Tunisia are now in more dire straits than Venezuela. It is just not getting the media coverage.
I used to think so. I think part of it is getting "used to the situation" and the other part is dramatization of the Venezuela crisis by the media.
Our roads are worse, the streets are much dirtier, and unless you are living around lamarsa/lac, then food shortages are real. If you can afford them in the first place. I live in a "wealthy" neighborhood and yesterday there was a water cut.
Yesterday I was at the airport. Looking at Venezuela/Caracas airport and comparing, the one here is much more degraded. What do you think is Venezuela situation? No electricity? It might as well be a reality here if the government doesn't get its shit together very soon.
I can't speak personally to Tunisia's situation. However the people of Venezuela are starving to death. They're no more than two or three years from genocide by starvation at this point (or otherwise requiring desperate, massive food aid from the UN, Russia, China, or whichever countries they would allow to deliver it).
Tunisia ranks 51 out of 113. Venezuela ranks 78 out of 113. That's a lagging ranking, things have gotten much worse in Venezuela over the last six months and year.
A year ago, when things weren't as bad as they are now, the situation was:
"Venezuelans reported losing on average 11 kilograms (24 lbs) in body weight last year [in 2017] and almost 90 percent now live in poverty, according to a new university study on the impact of a devastating economic crisis and food shortages. "
On a monetary, economic front, their inflation rate is so high as to be entirely pointless to track. They're formally a failed state with no functioning currency or central bank system.
Their economy has collapsed by 80% to 90%, in the last five years:
Tunisia's GDP per capita has declined in the last several years, back to about where it was in 2006/2007. They've seen a ~18% decline approximately, from the peak. A lot of that is dollar conversion decline however, only a small portion of it is real domestic economic contraction. Venezuela's collapse is a severe domestic contraction, a near total obliteration of all business and private enterprise, including basic stores (now entirely empty everywhere). Very little of Venezuela's decline is an issue of currency conversion against the jump in the US dollar: it's a flat out, straight down collapse.
When the US dollar took off on its historic run five years ago, it hit a lot of developing economies, including Tunisia. Tunisia's GDP per capita peaked in 2014, and began to decline, exactly in line with the USD taking off. Developing countries as diverse as Brazil, Russia, Pakistan, Turkey and Indonesia were hit by the same effect at the same time. The USD spike is also what pushed Venezuela under water, as it hammered the price of oil downward.
On a basic health front, diseases like malaria, diarrhea, typhoid fever and hepatitis A have skyrocketed in cases. Malaria has gone from relatively rare (15k-30k cases), to common (half a million annual cases), in Venezuela. At this point there is no functioning healthcare system in Venezuela, and essentially no medicine available to 99% of the population.
In terms of consumer goods, nearly all basic consumer goods were gone 18 to 24 months ago. They increasingly lack nearly all basic consumer staples, from diapers to toilet paper.
When it comes to access to safe drinking water, that too has essentially entirely disappeared. Water security is now a daily battle for nearly all the people of Venezuela:
"The water scarcity has driven people out of their homes and into the streets in search of any source, potable or not. ... Caracas, a city of 2 million, sits in a valley some 3,000 feet above sea level. The public water system relies on a succession of pumps that require massive amounts of energy. Without electricity, the water doesn’t flow."
Venezuela is seeing a severe flight of population, whereas Tunisia's population is solidly expanding year after year. Venezuela has seen maybe as many as three to four million people flee the country during the crisis. These people fleeing Venezuela are often living in imminent fear of starving to death, or the fear that that is what's to come next.
I think part of it is getting used to the situation. There is an ongoing battle between the military and armed-islamic groups. It is not a heavy conflict but this (https://thedefensepost.com/2019/04/27/tunisia-soldier-killed...) happened very recently and it is not a unique case.
There has also been several civilians either kidnapped or killed by armed terrorists. It has become common now and people stopped talking about it.
Also Tunisia has got a significant forgotten population. Think people with no access to water, electricity, roads, education... most Tunisians you'll see in the nicer neighborhoods do not relate to those and probably don't remember them except for some brief Facebook posts.
Tunisia rural population is around 30%. That's a third of the population. Compare that to 10% in Venezuela.
To answer your questions:
1- It is more likely we don't reach a consensus on how bad Tunisia is. You should take into account that probably neither of us went to Venezuela in the first place.
> RTL-SDR is a very cheap ~$25 USB dongle that can be used as a computer based radio scanner for receiving live radio signals in your area (no internet required). Depending on the particular model it could receive frequencies from 500 kHz up to 1.75 GHz. Most software for the RTL-SDR is also community developed, and provided free of charge.
I believe you can still get in trouble with these in the US; last I checked, for example, New York has a law forbidding the use of police-radio-monitoring equipment to monitor police frequencies when placed in a vehicle, at least. I wouldn't be surprised to hear there are other cities with stricter laws, even NYC itself.
Out of the box those devices act as digital TV and radio receivers.
In fact I have been using them for just that for many years. Weird that someone can get in trouble for having a TV/radio receiver.
The person who was arrested was using the device to probe stuff that the Tunisian government doesn't want to be made known. If he had been using binoculars and a notebook at the airport, he would have been arrested too.
They were watching him, knew what he was doing there, and used whatever pretext was at hand to arrest him upon arrival (which suggests he had been there before).
I don't know about the US, but German law has classes of knives you can only legally carry for purposes compatible with society. I am allowed to carry a leatherman for electrical work or to peel an apple, carrying that same knife for self defense or to play with it in front of the train station is illegal. You don't have to do anything, just carrying it in a suspicious context can be enough to have it confiscated.
The federal definition is essentially irrelevant unless you're traveling across state lines or live in DC. Such things are handled by the states in all other cases.
Yes, there are many jurisdictions in the US with unconstitutional arms laws.
But even then we don't have an attitude that self-defense is categorically "incompatible with society". Many politicians, activists, wealthy donors, and voters are de facto opposed to self-defense but they at least have to pay lip service to it.
>> Many politicians, activists, wealthy donors, ... are de facto opposed to self-defense but they at least have to pay lip service to it.
Unless you consider hiring (or working with tax-payer funded) armed protection a form of self-defense. Then they're very pro-self-defense. "Gun control" in America is a euphemism for "gun consolidation". We don't believe weapons of war belong in middle/lower-class people's homes, but they sure as hell belong in every patrol car and on the streets of countries whose oil we want to control.
Did the researcher actually stab someone with his RTL-SDR? I thought the arrest claimed just the ownership of the bread knife was enough reason for suspicion.
Because replacing analog radio with digital is expensive as everyone using it must be issued with new hardware (cops, fire trucks, EMS, public transport, military, secret services) and all relay/transmitter stations must be replaced too. Sometimes you actually have to build new stations especially underground/in big buildings because what in analog could be a bad, but understandable signal is undecipherable gibberish for a digital radio.
It took Germany until something like ~3 years ago to finally do the switch.
I've heard multiple times that you sometimes get understandable speech out of an analog radio where a digital signal wouldn't work. That doesn't make sense to me. If there is enough signal left for a human to understand speech, surely there is enough signal left for a computer to understand something if you have an appropriately chosen amount of ECC applied in your protocol.
The problem is twofold: "graceful degradation" and the effect of digital compression.
Digital schemes like TETRA and DMR compress the audio and add error correction. The audio bitrate for DMR is somewhere around 2400 Baud. This means a lot has to be thrown away. As a result, some things confuse the codec (usually AMBE). I have Scottish and Irish friends with strong accents; AMBE makes their voices both indistinguishable and unintelligible.
The second problem is what's sometimes called "the cliff-edge effect" or "graceful degradation". An FM signal degrades progressively as the signal gets weaker. If there's a temporary 'fading', you'll get a bit more hiss for a second or two. An experienced dispatcher or radio operator will often be able to "hear through" the hiss.
Digital signals don't degrade gracefully. The audio quality is perfect up to a point, but after that point things fail quickly. You get corrupted, missing or glitchy audio, loss of control packets (more lost audio), loss-of-sync (no audio until the next SYNC burst, ~1-2 secs)...
Incidentally, analog speech scramblers have similar issues. Rolling Spectrum Inversion scramblers send an FSK data-burst every time the seed (ephemeral key) changes. If your radio misses one of these bursts, the rx/tx audio will be screwed up for a second or two.
I still haven't fathomed why ETSI chose AMBE+2 for DMR. It's a codec made by an American company for compressing American English speech and it works reasonably well for that purpose. However, most speakers in my native language sound as if they were drunk or having a stroke.
Even Motorola has recognized that problem and added options in their programming software that makes the DSP boost higher frequencies before feeding the signal to the vocoder.
As to the graceful vs cliff-edge degradation of signals I've yet to see real comparisons where both analog and digital radios use the same frequency, radiated power and bandwidth (with co-channel interference!). With digital systems, the degradation will surely be much more noticeable, but the real question is whether the critical signal level is above or below that of the analog system.
> I still haven't fathomed why ETSI chose AMBE+2 for DMR. It's a codec made by an American company for compressing American English speech and it works reasonably well for that purpose. However, most speakers in my native language sound as if they were drunk or having a stroke.
When most or all testing is exclusively done on White US-english male persons, issues such as a lack of sensitivity/quality for anything diverging from that norm only crop up when it is way too late to fix.
It's more than purely testing[0], it's a lack of self-awareness. I remember seeing marketing / engagement material targeting worldwide customers and using American football as the illustration. Wrong kind of football if you're aiming beyond NA.
I expect it's partly due to the market ecosystem when DMR was created. The standard is codec-agnostic, but in practice DMRA (and thus all the manufacturers) settled on AMBE. If APCO P25 predated DMR, that'd at least partly explain the codec choice.
I'd absolutely love to see a Codec2 based DMR radio, even if it were a firmware mod to an existing radio.
As for the degradation - same. The only data I've seen is from radio manufacturers and the DMRA. Practically it's going to depend on the specific radio, the antenna and so on. You could measure sensitivity as dBm vs error rate for digital or dBm vs SINAD for analog and plot the two together.
Once you cross the line of what the ECC/FEC can handle, things tend to break down very quickly. Most DMR radios will cut out entirely if they see a lot of Post-FEC uncorrectable bit errors.
There is lots of discussion to be had here, including that analog signal degradation is linear while a digital signal simply 'vanishes' if the SNR gets below a threshold.
I suppose you could alternatively keep the existing analog infrastructure and apply an ECC to the analog signal too.
Instantaneous use is the same but channel management does probably make P25 more efficient for a bunch of departments to independently operate in limited spectrum.
I think it's more about the technical difficulties associated with effective key management. All law enforcement and emergency services in my area use P25 trunked radio for comms. Encryption is available on their radios. They don't use it.
additionally to the Expense, in some situations (for example in a burning house) where the radio reception gets bad an analog radio degrades better: the signal gets noisy but you can propably still understand what's said, and you can ask for repeats and piece together something out of a few retransmissions.
With digital radio on the other hand, a bad signal results in lost chunks. There the transmission is clear until it gets choppy and that's a lot harder to make anything out of.
BTW, does anyone know why aren't there codecs that would increase the speaking latency but spread out the information over a wider range of the signal, so that the lost chunks could simply be reconstructed from last and the next chunks received?
That's just another ECC and things like raptor codes to exist, which could achieve analog-ish characteristics in digital transmissions.
I suspect this kind of encoding works badly with encryption, as decryption needs a perfect preimage otherwise the decrypted message will simply be garbage. Also, even a slightly increased delay makes for very awkward conversations.
The article doesn't mention this, but according to TAP, he was traveling with his regular passport instead of a diplomatic one[1], so he had no diplomatic immunity.
I think he used his normal passport because he was entering his own country and had no doubt he is fine. Should be an unthinkable measure to take from here forward for UN officials.
My understanding is that the host country has to agree to receive diplomats, and can expel them at their leisure.
Could it be the case that Tunisia didn't grant his ingress as a diplomat they knew would be investigating their non-compliance with sanctions, he went and did the investigation anyway, and Tunisia now consider this to be a violation of that non-consent?
It's a bit more complex with the UN than normal diplomatic immunity (it is not a country after all). A bit of Google tells me that specialists working for the UN have the same protections as UN officials for the purpose of their mandate and the protections of all UN officials are roughly equivalent to that of a "normal" diplomat:
"As opposed to United Nations officials, experts on missions for the United Nations, like members of the International Law Commission, Special Rapporteurs, or members of United Nations peacekeeping operations, serve under a temporary and specific mandate. They also enjoy certain functionally limited privileges and immunities pursuant to article VI of the General Convention."[1]
The relevant document is "Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the Specialized Agencies" from 1947[2].
So, as long as the US doesn't intend to break that convention specialists working for the UN probably have immunity in the US too.
he is accused of "spying", that is: collecting information about things the tunisian government doesn't want other people to know and then give that information to foreign parties.
His job for the UN was to find out if tunisia is violating UN rules.
In other words, he did exactly what they are accusing him of, just that it isn't spying because tunisia have themselves decided to be a part of UN.
If the UN was some sort of real power in the world, it might be. However, it is really only as powerful as the US military makes it, and the current administration has a very dim opinion of the importance, the usefulness, and even the necessity of the UN.
US foreign policy since WWII has been to maintain hegemony by (successfully) gently discouraging European military strength. The power of the rest of the membership is limited by design and has led to quite a lot of world peace. If you want evidence look at the long list of treaties the US has not signed [1] in order to not lose sovereignty to the international community.
There are some real limitations in matters of range and equipment. They are not allowed to have aircraft carriers or cruise missles. IIRC, they are not allowed bomber planes as well. Tools of projections are forbidden.
Off topic, but let me throw a few bits here. It's certainly not a US tool, not like NATO is: when UN security council vetoed (Russia, China) bombing of Serbia and Montenegro in 1999, US/NATO went ahead anyway.
But when appropriate, US govt will pull out a UN card. When not, it will be simply disregarded.
So UN doesn't have any power in the real sense: Serbia has been relying on that power yet there's this now practically independent state of Kosovo created against UN rules. Not that I agree with the rules (hopefully we can amend them so there is a viable way for regions to split out of their parent countries, thus avoiding wars).
I'm not sure why this comment is being down voted. I think it's a significant aspect of today's geopolitics that US, arguably after having become an exporter of oil, is becoming protectionist and is actively showing disinterest in foreign cooperation. Given that some of these world-police organizations (forgive the lay-man expression) heavily rely on US, this is pertinent.
OMG. I am Tunisian and was planing to buy an sdr dongle next month for research purposes. I guess if I had done it I would be in big trouble by now. It is well known here that customs are very suspicious about any device they do not recognize. Back in the early 2000s they were questioning people about their USB sticks!
they explain that he was using the RTL-SDR as part of his investigation for monitoring air traffic to Libya in an attempt to link flights against violations of the arms embargo.
So the person in question supposedly wanted to prove that Tunisia is potentially violating UN embargo by possibly monitoring air traffic communications without permission.
Tunisia and Algeria are well-known in enthusiast circles as countries where you do not try to monitor ATC or Mode-S transmissions.
He had a noble cause but what he was doing would have to be done in a hands-off, anonymous way with relay to an outside recipient. Perhaps remote solar-charged SoC units with satellite uplink, but that's getting into serious money.
Another Tunisian here. Our country is backwards when it comes to tech. Heck, you can get arrested for bringing a drone into the country without proper security authorization...
Putting aside the arrest which is legal,
I wouldn't say Tunisia is backwards when it comes to technology and innovation but I guess
with security reasons Tunisia find it self impellent to make such decisions, I mean the last years haven't been
easy when it comes to terrorism and now you're between the civil war in Libya and maybe a revolution in Algeria.
RTL-SDR from rtl-sdr.com is essentially a particular USB TV tuner, just repackaged into a form that makes it more suitable for SDR use (higher-quality soldering, metal cover, etc.). You can look for that TV tuner sold as a TV tuner, and get roughly the same capabilities.
It seems like this was politically motivated and if one were off the radar it may not be an issue. If you're concerned about someone looking for an excuse to arrest you, that might be an unfortunate cause for concern.
Having a beard is very enough to raise their suspicion as they will link you to terrorism without thinking twice. In 2015 I bought a metal detector online and they thought I will use it to search for monuments. They returned it and I was lucky it ended there.
From a purely statistical viewpoint, there are 11M Tunisians out of 7.5 billion people, which would put them at 1.5 out of any 1000 people are Tunisian :) Even if we take technological and language exposure (which is what I am guessing you are hinting at), I'd say at least 1 person in 5000 on here is Tunisian :) And I suspect there are more than 5000 people on HN.
If this was more of a small-talk "hey I've lived there and so nice to be reminded of it", pardon my intrusion with data :)
Yeah statistically speaking you are probably right. It's probably because the vast majority of people around here are from the US. I'm from Spain and I rarely find Spaniards either.
Damn, I wonder what countries my EDC kit could get me arrested in. I often carry one of those around, it's a lot of fun to listen in on ATC or just scan the spectrum for interesting signals.
These SDRs are technically illegal here in the US because they can pick up the old AMPS mobile phone band.
AMPS is completely gone now, and that provision of the ECPA hasn't been enforced against individuals in a long time as far as I'm aware. But it's still on the books. ("When there aren't enough criminals, one makes them.")
So if a tourist carries RTL-SDR device to listen to local music on FM radio, he/she/other is going to rot in jail or worse?
Tunisia being a tourist hot spot I expected their customs to be knowledgeable enough to differentiate a malicious device.
I think they had already made their mind to arrest this person and RTL device is just a scape goat (or) they were super paranoid for some reason & this person was just unlucky to have a USB device with a antennae which for the uninformed has spy gadget written all over it.
Given that an RTL-SDR is a device capable of receiving and intercepting all sorts of radio signals, I would be very careful of traveling with one unless I was intimately familiar with the relevant laws of the country I was traveling to.
The thing about an RTL-SDR is that it's just a TV/FM tuner, sold for that purpose, but with alternative drivers on the host you can use it for general RF tuning. My RTL-SDR is a cheap Chinese TV tuner dongle. They need access to his PC in order to prove that it's being used for other things than watching TV.
They do however leak their local oscillator through the antenna, albeit at really low signal levels. Two ham friends experimented with slow FSK across the room.
On the contrary, the reason for this kind of arrest is usually a military paranoia over the import of military equipment.
You may not take them seriously as a technological country, but such arrests indicate that the army is worried about the smuggling of military tech and has power to enforce checks.
If they're arresting people for even a $20 component/tool, then it stands to reason that they are more authoritarian and vigilant; not less of a threat or incompetent!
You can be both vigilant and incompetent. For example, when you're being extremely vigilant over civilians noticing a glaring weak point instead of fixing it.
As someone who has read a history book or three, the idea of giving the government, military, and police a monopoly on weaponry (or radio receivers, for that matter) sounds even more insane. I guess it's a matter of perspective.
Nominally off-topic for the thread as well, although I'd argue that both "gun control" and "SDR control" are two points on the same continuum.
(Don't worry about the downvotes -- you'll get the karma back in a few hours, as soon as the Europeans start waking up.)
>the idea of giving the government, military, and police a monopoly on weaponry (or radio receivers, for that matter) sounds even more insane.
I've heard this line of reasoning often when discussing this topic and never really understood.
I'm curious - the government/military have tanks, aircraft, nuclear weapons etc. There is a massive imbalance of power regardless of whether citizens have guns. In what scenarios with respect to the government/military/police do you see being armed as providing an advantage?
I can see the advantage from the police side in terms of more easily justifying shooting people ("he had a gun / I thought he had a gun"), but not from the citizens' side.
I'm not advocating either side, I'm just curious to understand the genesis of this argument.
Keep in mind that military is a tool of the last resort for the tyranny when dealing with its own population.
One typical scenario in the suppression of the free speech is the (illegally) armed brownshirts breaking down the door of the family house where the wrongthink assembly is taking place and lynching the people inside. The police shows up in the morning and -- wow, another one of the unsolvable crimes by the unknown perpertrators with the unknowable motives. Add guns and suddenly this is impossible. Storming a firearm-defended position is not something a brownshirt mob is able to do.
The second scenario is the police overreach. The shocktroopers in blue show up at the ghetto and load up the whole households of 'undesirables' into the black cars to never be seen again. Again, this all falls apart if the population is armed. Once it is clear to the masses that the purge is going to take place, the ghetto becomes a killing field because every window is a gun port and the stopped cars are the perfect targets.
The point of the armed populace in 21st century is not to win the war with the tyrant's standing army. It's to make sure that the tyrant cannot disappear the large swathes of population without taking casualties and without making what's going on obvious to the public.
No idea what events you are referring to by 'multiple times'. For scenario 2 I mostly think of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising where they did eventually burn it completely -- but it took a large amount of resourses, a considerable time -- and most importantly it created a point of resistance making it impossible to pretend that nothing atrocious was happening.
Of course, that's not the best example to cite when trying to argue that the police, government, and military should have a monopoly on the tools of violence.
> I'm curious - the government/military have tanks, aircraft, nuclear weapons etc. There is a massive imbalance of power regardless of whether citizens have guns.
Well look at lessons from history - which of those weapons end up actually being used against rebelling citizens of a country?
From my limited knowledge it's hand weapons plus armored vehicles, and rarely, very rarely, tanks.
Against that an armed populace can stand. Plus don't forget the populace would be a guerrilla force, while the government would be visible.
A typical scenario: The government wants to arrest someone. What weapons would they use? Not heavy ones! If the citizens have no weapons the government doesn't need any weapons at all, but if the citizens have someone as simple as hand guns suddenly things are not so simple for the government.
In short: The government doesn't want to wipe out its own citizens (nuclear weapons? seriously?) they want to selectively remove undesirables. And against that, personal weapons are quite effective.
If the US government thinks rebels are a real threat to its territorial integrity or sovereignty the laws of armed conflict will be abandoned in short order and they’ll use every advantage they have to crush rebellion. If the ATF can do Ruby Ridge and Waco and get away Scot free with precalculated murder (the first) or setting tens of people on fire deliberately and interfering with evidence what do you think the military would do with a threat they were taking seriously? They’d kill everything that moved. The Russians have shown the world how effective guerillas are against state backed monsters in Chechnya. Monsters win. The fact that the US can’t ein in Afghanistan with its rules of engagement is a fact about the RoE, not the US capacity to defeat insurgencies.
If the ATF can do Ruby Ridge and Waco and get away Scot free with precalculated murder (the first)
But they didn't get away scot free, did they? Among other consequences, the governments' actions at Ruby Ridge and Waco inspired a couple of psychos (McVeigh and Nichols) to commit an atrocity of their own to take revenge. [1]
Fast-forward to the occupation of the Malheur refuge by the Branch Dildonians several years later. This time, the government waited them out. They knew better than to take a third swing at the hornet's nest. They were arguably afraid to go up against US citizens using violence as a first resort.
You can see that as a good thing -- and I do -- without having any sympathy at all for the beliefs and actions of the Malheur occupiers, with McVeigh, or with Randy Weaver for that matter.
> But they didn't get away scot free, did they? Among other consequences, the governments' actions at Ruby Ridge and Waco inspired a couple of psychos (McVeigh and Nichols) to commit an atrocity of their own to take revenge.
No one was charged or convicted as a result of Ruby Ridge or Waco. No one involved was fired or demoted. No one paid any personal price for killing people who need not have died, or for destroying and tampering with evidence. Everyone involved got away Scot free.
It's the argument that lead to the second amendment of the US constitution, this argument is obviously completely irrelevant in the 21-century. But facts have long gone from american politics.
I have a few questions for you that should make you think:
How big is the US Army? How many of those soldiers would simply go home in such a scenario vs those staying loyal to the government for whatever reason? How many firearms in the US are in private hands?
Tanks, planes etc are for force on force warfare, not asymmetric scenarios like a "government turned evil, we need to rise up"
The citizenry being armed is an incredible advantage when it comes to stopping a tyrannical government because, as is the case of the USA, it protects freedom of speech (no one's changing the 1st amendment while there's a 2nd), which is the main block to tyranny. If that fails you have guerrilla warfare to fall back on, which is incredibly effective.
> Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.
It's also a logical implication of standard liberal (e.g. Locke) thought. Since all men are equal before the law and are innocent until proven guilty, and have the right to protect themselves and their property, why should anyone be denied a weapon when others can be?
In what scenarios with respect to the
government/military/police do you see
being armed as providing an advantage?
I heard a podcast a year or two ago [1] that said the current interpretation of the second amendment only started in the 1960s - and far from being a right-wing view, it was started by the far-left Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.
The Black Panthers decided to 'observe the police' by following police cars with shotgun-carrying armed patrols. That motivated things like the Mulford Act [2] - a Republican act banning carrying loaded guns in public.
So in other words, part of the genesis of the individual rights interpretation of the second amendment, and the notion of using personal guns to oppose an oppressive state, is literally one white cop in a car being followed by six black panthers who are keeping an eye on him.
I can see the advantage from the police
side in terms of more easily justifying
shooting people
The Black Panthers' activities in the 1960s certainly didn't eliminate police brutality towards minorities.
(Incidentally, the podcast also says the NRA in that era was a sports-shooting magazine that barely had a political arm, and didn't oppose gun control)
Keeping your government honest/keeping it from slipping towards tyranny doesn't require power parity with the standing army. At the end of the day, all politics and all government is local. You remove a government's legitimacy by rendering your territory un-governable. So who are the implements of state power at the local level?
Police chiefs. Mayors. Governors. District attorneys. Tax collectors. Etc.... You don't need tanks and aircraft to render these people incapable of performing their functions. Small arms (and maybe some improvised explosives) are sufficient. That's the true leverage and power of an armed citizenry backed by a supportive population. Afghanistan has repeatedly (and continues) to prove this.
Isn’t New Hampshire’s state motto “Live free or die”?
It wouldn’t work in the US anyway. The gloves would come off in a long running civil war as they always do and there would be collective punishment, population resettlement and other war crimes. The US is as likely to follow international law in a war it genuinely feels is an existential threat as anyone else, not at all.
People who claim the US wouldn't bomb itself to smitherenes in order to maintain order seem to forget General Sherman's march to the sea.
Every argument the "Guns will protect us from the government" crowd claims was already proven false over 100 years ago, and that was when the average citizen was still on equal footing in terms of firepower.
There's also the fact that in the past 120 years, there has not been a concerted effort to "Rise up" despite many actual atrocities. So, gun owners, what would it take for you to attempt to march on Washington with your arms readied? The only time it ever happened was because people were denied the "right" to own other human beings. What is finally the breaking point that gets people willing to die against the might of the war machine?
Of course there is an imbalance of power. There's no way an individual that feels threatened by the external collective can fight back with a gun or two. Even if you're the prepper type who's stocked up on ammo and well prepared, that fight is eventually going to end with you losing. Life isn't Rambo where an individual takes on an entire collective and comes out the winner.
Even then, it is better to go out with at least a little bit of a fight if you're attacked. In the end I suppose it doesn't matter whether you're carrying or not, because even if you are able to defend yourself from an attack by the collective, that is only a momentary win. They'll get you in the end anyway.
Is there any chance you hear from the people who make sure to let you know, don't hear from the people who don't care whether you know, and concluded that 100% of people carrying guns need you to hear about how they have them?
> Folks who feel a need to carry guns always have to let everybody on the internet know they pack heat.
That sweeping generalization is utterly incorrect. Though, if we're talking about the weirdos who would carry a Glock chambered in .45 in the 21st century, I'm inclined to agree.
That would mean excluding Egypt, the United States, China, India, Russia, and Indonesia, or roughly half the world's population, or 3/5 permanent UNSC members.
No, but if you pay attention, the US, Russia, and other global powers are engaged in proxy wars all over the globe. We continue to fund terrorism. We are on the cusp of another cold war with Russia. China is moving for market dominance and expansion of their totalitarian regime.
The West's global markets are on thinner ice than ever. Domestically, the US, the world's biggest superpower, is crumbling. Poverty is on the rise. The wealth gap broadens. The US has begun assaulting its citizens' Constitutionally granted rights, including the rights to free speech and the right to bear arms against the government.
Dozens and dozens of extremely important natural resources, minerals, etc will be dried up within half a century. This will likely lead to global instability and riots. [0]
The environment is wasted. Thousands of animals and insects and other life evaporated. We are literally in the middle of a global extinction event [1] whose impact has yet to be fully appreciated. Our biosphere is rapidly collapsing. Our generation will be synonymous with plastic and the destruction of the Earth.
Multiple Middle Eastern countries are gaining access to nuclear weaponry. Things are as tense with Iran as ever. Al-Qaeda's plan [2] for Islamic global domination and war, while dampened for a moment, is still chugging right along. ISIS is not gone. We have not defeated them. They want a global religious war and everything they do is working towards this goal.
If we get out of the next three decades without a world war, I will be very surprised. The coming War for Resources is inevitable, the only unknown is when.
The UN is an intergovernmental organisation with pretensions to universality and relevance to international law. Any kind of real enforcement activity is national, as ever. That means only the Security Council does it and if you want China and Russia to enforce human rights they’ll be a very specific version of HR law.
The UN is an intergovernmental organisation with pretensions to universality and relevance to international law. Any kind of real enforcement activity is national, as ever.
> As Kartas' business in Tunisia was to present his findings on the arms embargo violations, other experts believe that the arrest is politically motivated, and that ownership of the RTL-SDR for espionage is simply being used as an excuse.
No kidding. The government is failing on several fronts; and is trying to gain popularity by making fake moves (like finding and arresting a spy). They did that to several business man. The good news, they released them (no charges, no evidence, no nothing). The bad news, some of them were released only a year later. They had no right to a lawyer or a trial during that time. It was "investigation".
This is possible because technically speaking the country is under martial-law which keeps getting renewed every month. The sad thing people are quite busy these days trying to find gas, milk and basic necessities. The interest on political and freedom-related news is way down from the first few years of the said revolution.
It is funny because looking at the pictures, some parts of Tunisia are now in more dire straits than Venezuela. It is just not getting the media coverage.