Zajímavé aktuální zahraniční články

[Ivor.Kollar]

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/ ... war-crimes

[Martin.Stanek]

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-01/ ... /100339264
Vůbec si nejsem jistej, co tohle v kombinaci s copyrightem znamená...

[Vojtech.Pikal]

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-01/ ... /100339264
Vůbec si nejsem jistej, co tohle v kombinaci s copyrightem znamená...

Mno, pokud bypro copyright platilo to co pro patenty, tedy že "držitelem intelektuálního vkladu" může být stroj, tak asi "nekonečný copyright", protože ten se teď počítá od úmrtí umělce.

[Michael.Polak]

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-01/ ... /100339264
Vůbec si nejsem jistej, co tohle v kombinaci s copyrightem znamená...

Mno, pokud bypro copyright platilo to co pro patenty, tedy že "držitelem intelektuálního vkladu" může být stroj, tak asi "nekonečný copyright", protože ten se teď počítá od úmrtí umělce.

Ano, přijde mi, že to je nějaký hack, kterým se korporace budou chtít bránit předpokládaným odlišným regulacím čehokoliv (samozřejmě v čele s autorskými právy) odlišně pro právnické a fyzické osoby. Prohlásit umělou inteligenci za "fyzickou osobu", akorát nesmrtelnou, mi přijde jako potenciálně strašně nebezpečný hack... těžko si představit další možné právní důsledky přidělený osobnostních práv fyzické osoby umělým inteligencím...

[davkol]

Why Conservatives Around the World Have Embraced Hungary’s Viktor Orbán

A sociologist explains why the country’s Prime Minister is “the ultimate twenty-first-century dictator.”

…

I recently spoke by phone with Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of sociology at Princeton who is an expert on Hungarian politics and constitutional law. Scheppele met Orbán in the early nineteen-nineties, when she was a researcher working with the Hungarian Constitutional Court and he was a rising politician of the center right. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why Orbán has become a model for conservatives around the world, how he could remain powerful in Hungary even after leaving office, and what makes him, in Scheppele’s words, “the ultimate twenty-first-century dictator.”

…

That was a big thing in 2015, when immigration was in the news, but Orbán was doing that in 2014 in his election campaign, which is to say he was anti-migrant even before there were migrants. He was against taking in other peoples before they actually arrived at the doorstep. But, here again, Orbán is a hypocrite. At the same time that he’s erecting walls, Orbán has created this program through which anyone can buy permanent residence in Hungary—they sold permanent residence during those same years to more than fifteen thousand Chinese people. This is not a policy I object to, but he was not, even on his own terms, being consistent with who was being let in. Later, after Venezuela collapsed, Hungary took in hundreds of Venezuelans. He has a very active foreign policy. He makes partnership agreements with some Gulf states.

…

No, Orbán doesn’t. I met him when I lived in Hungary in the nineties. And I know people who used to be in his party until, in fact, very recently. Everybody who knows Orbán personally says, “This guy is not an ideologue. He doesn’t really believe this stuff.” That said, he knows he has to win elections. Hungary has a parliamentary system—it’s like a British system, where you win in individual districts and party lists, and then the Prime Minister is the one who gets the most seats. So he needs an ideology to govern a party in that kind of system. But I don’t think he believes it, because he changes what he says day to night. His Fidesz Party started off as the Hayekian liberal party in Hungary: small state, no regulation, freedom for everybody. The state, ideally, would wither away. And this is the opposite of what he’s created.

So, no, he’s an opportunist, but, as for the corruption, the difference between Orbán and Trump is, frankly, that Orbán is cleverer. He’s also a lawyer. So everything Orbán has done in Hungary has been legal. Trump just kind of wakes up one morning, decides to do something, orders people to do it, and is vaguely annoyed if they don’t just do it. Orbán wakes up one morning, decides to do something, drafts a law, rams it through the parliament, and then does it.

…

Orbán may well have said that, and what he would have meant by it is different from what Dougherty thought. Hungary’s a small country. Its population was about ten million people when Orbán came to power. The estimates are a little unreliable, but many people think that it’s down a million since Orbán took office. People have left. And why have they left? It’s because Orbán hits people economically. He doesn’t arrest journalists and jail them. He doesn’t torture his opponents. He doesn’t use brutal methods of that kind. But he does deprive them of any possibility of an income. When he came to office, he fired huge numbers of people from the public sector. And then he went sector by sector through the economy and squeezed it, both the private sector and the public sector.

I interviewed a bunch of people in 2012 who said that they were given lists by Orbán’s people, and that if they hired any of the people on this list they would be ineligible for state contracts. And this is a country where the primary development funds—the primary money for doing anything in the country—is coming from E.U. funds. Most of these businessmen said they couldn’t afford to hire anybody on the blacklist, because they couldn't afford to do without state contracts. So many, many Hungarians have left. The Hungarian government doesn’t keep emigration figures, but other European countries keep immigration figures—how many moved to Germany, et cetera. And, based on this, my colleague Daniel Kelemen estimates that between eight hundred thousand and a million people left Hungary in the first ten years of Orbán’s term. They’ve lost college students, because Orbán has started to charge tuition at universities, and stopped giving out fellowships. College used to be functionally free in Hungary, until Orbán came to power. Now it’s not. So what happens is that ambitious students learn German and go to free German universities.

The people that he’s lost are largely the Hungarians who would vote against him, because Orbán’s base is like Trump’s base: it’s largely uneducated, it’s rural, it’s people who don’t really have the option to go abroad. In the meantime, he’s given citizenship to ethnic Hungarians in neighboring states. The voting population is about the same, but he lost a million voters who don’t support him and he gained a million voters who do. And he did that by making it almost impossible for the people who left Hungary to vote in Hungarian elections. It’s an incredibly brilliant strategy. So, yes, Orbán’s there because of emigration.

…

Orbán is the ultimate twenty-first-century dictator. Twentieth-century dictatorships were about ideology and repression: physical repression with this detestable ideology. Twenty-first-century authoritarianism works through economic means rather than physical means. So economic coercion is everywhere in Hungary. But, if you went there on vacation, you would never guess that it’s a dictatorship. And that’s because the way that Orbán exercises control is through money. Orbán has eliminated the system of welfare and unemployment insurance and so on, so that you only get those things if you pass his litmus test. With the media, his oligarchs have bought out all the media that were critical of him. They’ve consolidated the banking sector in their hands.

And so this is the new form of oppression. It doesn’t look like oppression if you’re on the streets of Budapest. But if you live there and you have no money and you can’t get an income because no one will hire you, then what happens? You have to leave. So, it’s a combination of regulatory adjustments, but mostly it’s economic measures, and those are not very visible. Human-rights groups are not really attuned to tracking those the way that they would track journalists in jail.

…

One of the ways that Orbán governed was by positioning himself in the middle of the Hungarian spectrum, at least as his rhetoric goes. For the opposition to defeat him, they had to unite all of the other political parties. There is the Socialist Party, which is the former Communist Party and now has no Communists in it. Anybody who was a former Communist under the old regime is in Orbán’s party, not in the Socialist Party. And then there are some liberal parties, and there’s a little Green Party. And then there’s the former neo-Nazis, Jobbik, who have moved a bit toward the center. In order for the opposition to win, given the way the election system is structured, all those parties have to work together. And after ten years of Orbán, they’ve finally decided to. In Tucker Carlson’s interview, Carlson said, “The former Communists are allied with anti-Semites, and they’re running against you.” And then Orbán said, “You see, I’m the only sane guy around.”

…

Isaac Chotiner
August 10, 2021
The New Yorker

[Martin.Stanek]

AlgorithmWatch forced to shut down Instagram monitoring project after threats from Facebook

tl;dr shrnutí:
facebook (a instagram) nedovolují automatický sběr dat z jejich sítí (LOLOLOL, od nich to SEDÍ) třetími stranami, dokonce ani za účelem výzkumu. přesně takto se stalo, že opět zabraňují (pod pohrůžkou soudního postihu) výzkumníkům reverse-engineerovat fungování jejich algoritmu, který zjevně podporuje zesilování toxických vlastností těchto sociálních sítí za účelem zvýšení zisku z reklamy a prodeje dat.

[davkol]

The Whitewashing of the Afghan War. As the U.S. withdraws, a re-examination of the ‘good war’.

A few days ago, American troops withdrew from Bagram air base north of Kabul, in a hush-hush operation. Local Afghan allies were not informed. The Americans reportedly left hundreds of energy drinks, ready-to-eat meals, and literally tons of garbage, causing outrage among Afghans on social media.

As America’s “longest war” comes to an end, many international news outlets reported about Bagram without mentioning the base’s dark past. It’s part of a revisionist history that overlooks the massive torture apparatus, civilian casualties, and violent corruption caused by the United States’ two decades in Afghanistan.

Since the Bush administration, Bagram served as the nexus and central hub in America’s war in Afghanistan. In the early 2000s, it morphed into a small Americanized town. After conducting brutal operations in Afghan villages, troops enjoyed KFC and Burger King. Prisoners, many of whom were innocent or held indefinitely without charge, were tortured and murdered mere doors away from the fast-food outposts. The Bagram complex included several notorious prisons, so-called “black sites,” brutal settings that typify the American-led war. It was in places like this that young Afghan men were brutally murdered by American interrogators. Dilawar Yaqoubi, a 22-year-old cab driver from southeastern Khost province, was abducted and beaten to death in December 2002.

…

This is perhaps how the media can portray American airstrikes as something “positive” and “necessary” against increasing Taliban gains. Yet in fact, American aircraft, including the celebrated and “precise” predator drones, killed thousands of innocent Afghans during the last two decades. America’s real targets remained elusive. Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar died of natural causes in 2013. Jalaluddin Haqqani, another Taliban leading figure, died in 2018. Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed by a Navy SEAL team in May 2011 in the heart of Pakistan. His deputy, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, may still be alive. These men did not hide themselves in remote Afghan villages, which the Americans had bombed. According to reports, Omar lived close to an American air base in Zabul province, while bin Laden was not in Afghanistan at all and spent his last years in Abbottabad, a highly secured garrison town in Pakistan.

…

What started as a counterterrorism operation led to wholesale cooperation with and empowerment of rapacious warlords, corrupt politicians, and drug barons. Many of them still dominate Afghan politics. In 2009, it was revealed that Ahmad Wali Karzai, one of the most notorious drug lords in Afghanistan’s south and half-brother of then-President Hamid Karzai, was on the CIA’s payroll for years. Ahmad Karzai was killed in July 2011 by his own head of security. Gen. Abdul Raziq Achakzai, a well-known police chief and another important American-built ally in the same region, was accused of torture, kidnapping, and mass murder while he was also involved in the lucrative drug trade, which has increased constantly since the American invasion. Achakzai was killed in 2018.

Other questionable strongmen are still alive and intimately mingle with politics. Assadullah Khaled, Afghanistan’s current defense minister, is accused of similar crimes by Human Rights Watch and other watchdogs. Khaled used to have private torture dungeons in his own home while serving as governor and chief of the Afghan intelligence service, the NDS. He was also accused of the murder of three United Nations employees and the abductions and sexual abuse of minors in 2019. Vice President Amrullah Salehonce ran the NDS too, and was responsible for countless human rights violations during the early phase of the “war on terror.” Abdul Rashid Dostum, one of Afghanistan’s most notorious warlords, was promoted to marshall last year by President Ashraf Ghani personally. In the first days of the war on terror, Dostum and his militia conducted some of the most brutal crimes of modern Afghan history, like the massacre of Dasht-e Laili, executing thousands of Taliban prisoners of war and civilians in containers in a desert north of Kabul.

These are some of the men Western countries worked with. All of them also enabled massive corruption. They stole billions of dollars of aid money and reinvested it in mansions in Kabul and luxury real estate in the United Arab Emirates. They built private armies to conduct more human rights violations. The Americans and their allies are complicit in all of these crimes. They actively supported them and believed that it was something necessary to maintain the war on terror.

America did not build a single democratic institution in Afghanistan. Instead, warlordism and corruption became part of the country’s political culture like never before. The last democratic elections, like all of the elections held by a supposedly democratic republic, were a total charade. The political leaders of the country were not elected by Afghan voters but actually selected by Washington.

And after 20 years of failure, many Western observers still prefer to live in a bubble.

Emran Feroz
July 14, 2021
The American Prospect

[Milus.Kotisova]

K Afghánistánu od Glenna Greenwalda (netřeba jistě představovat):

The U.S. Government Lied For Two Decades About Afghanistan
Using the same deceitful tactics they pioneered in Vietnam, U.S. political and military officials repeatedly misled the country about the prospects for success in Afghanistan.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-us ... e=substack

[Janka.Michailidu]

‘Spreading like a virus’: inside the EU’s struggle to debunk Covid lies
Several sources suggested that rather than trying to fix EU vs Disinfo, the EU should fund civil society to do the job instead. “You don’t want this work to be done by a political entity that suffers from questions of democratic legitimacy,” said Richter.

[davkol]

Over Two Decades, U.S.’s Global War on Terror Has Taken Nearly 1 Million Lives and Cost $8 Trillion. A new report from the Costs of War Project makes staggering estimates for the human and financial costs of the global forever wars.

The U.S.-led global war on terror has killed nearly 1 million people globally and cost more than $8 trillion since it began two decades ago. These staggering figures come from a landmark report issued Wednesday by Brown University’s Costs of War Project, an ongoing research effort to document the economic and human impact of post-9/11 military operations.

The report — which looks at the tolls of wars waged in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and other regions where the U.S. is militarily engaged — is the latest in a series published by the Costs of War Project and provides the most extensive public accounting to date of the consequences of open-ended U.S. conflicts in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa, referred to today as the “forever wars.”

…

The staggering economic costs of the war on terror pale in comparison to the direct human impact, measured in people killed, wounded, and driven from their homes. The Costs of War Project’s latest estimates hold that 897,000 to 929,000 people have been killed during the wars. Of those killed, 387,000 are categorized as civilians, 207,000 as members of national military and police forces, and a further 301,000 as opposition fighters killed by U.S.-led coalition troops and their allies. The report also found that around 15,000 U.S. military service members and contractors have been killed in the wars, along with a similar number of allied Western troops deployed to the conflicts and several hundred journalists and humanitarian aid workers.

…

Like its previous studies, the death toll calculated by the Costs of War Project focuses only on deaths directly caused by violence during the global war on terror and does not include “indirect deaths, namely those caused by loss of access to food, water, and/or infrastructure, war-related disease” that have resulted from the conflicts. The report’s footnotes also state that “some of the people classified as opposition fighters may actually have been civilians as well, since there are political incentives to classify the dead as militants rather than civilians” — a caveat that dovetails with the U.S. government’s own confessed practice of labeling any “military-age males” killed in its operations as combatants unless proved otherwise.

…

Even that [$5.8 trillion], however, does not represent the full expenses imposed by the wars. Tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers have returned from foreign war zones maimed and traumatized, turning many into long-term dependents of the federal government. The cost of providing disability and medical care for these veterans is likely to exceed $2.2 trillion by 2050 from its current post-9/11 total of $465 billion, bringing the total economic bill of the wars to $8 trillion.

…

In reality, the invasion and occupation of Iraq — just one of a number of conflicts fought by the U.S. across the world since 9/11 — has wound up costing trillions of dollars while destabilizing the Middle East and breeding secondary conflicts that have continued to draw the U.S. in at further expense and loss of life. Current events have grimly underlined how the situation has grown out of control. The recent airport terrorist attack in Afghanistan, which killed over a dozen U.S. service members and around 170 Afghans, was claimed by a local branch of the Islamic State, a terrorist group that did not exist at the start of the global war on terror and was birthed amid the chaos created by the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

…

Murtaza Hussain
September 1, 2021
The Intercept