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Is your issue just with the use of the word piracy?

 

Because France and other western goverments are doing things to help the anti-somalian piracy

This post was really about the irony that a word mis-used suddenly becomes relevant again.




They occasionally capture pirates (real such), keep them in luxury rooms on war ships for a few days, and then return them to Somalia.

The German Green party have used the opportunity for a racist insult of Kenia when the German government suggested handing over suspected pirates (i.e. people who have been found firing at merchant ships on the high seas) to Kenian courts. The Greens said that we cannot know whether Kenia can be trusted to respect the human rights of the pirates. (You never know with those Africans...)

Can kenya be trusted?

Would call it racist to say that Hamas can not be trusted with rockets (you never know with these arabs)

I have no reason to assume that it cannot be.

And all the Green party knew about Kenya was that it was an African country. Kenya is not internationally known for human rights violations or anything like that. In fact if you ask random people about Kenya, they can probably tell you but two things: it's a country in Africa and the home of Obama's father.




You don't differentiate between having reasons and not having reasons, do you?

I would say that Kenya can be trusted based on what I know about Kenya (it is a functioning if poor country not known for its aggressive racism) and that Hamas cannot be trusted based on what I know about them (they fire rockets at civilians and schools and are proud anti-Semites).

Calling a random African government untrustwowrthy when one wouldn't do the same with, say, a European government is racist.

But then there are people in the German Green party who'd rather trust Nazis or terrorists than Africans.

I realise that for some not trusting blacks and not trusting known terrorists and murderers is the same sort of thing, but for me there is a difference.

I think this was possibly the first Kenya-Hamas comparison I ever had to deal with.

Is it sympathy for anti-Semitism or distrust of Africans or, as is often the case, both that cause these things?

 

Kenya does have question marks over its treatment of criminals and other human rights issues.  

I have no sympathy for anti-semitism or inate distrust with Africans, nor did I compare Hamas to Kenya.  I compared calling an anti-Keyans statement racist because it is African to an anti Hamas statment anti-Arab.

Really? I haven't heard anything major.




I don't think you get the fact that people who make statements about Hamas usually know what Hamas are about whereas people who make statements about Kenya certainly do not have such knowledge about Kenya.

Kenya simply isn't known or famous for giving one lots of reasons not to trust the country.

Whether or not Hamas is Arab has nothing to do with opinions about Hamas. I don't think there exist anti-Arab bigots who need the reason "Hamas is Arab" to hate the group. So even if an anti-Arab racist hates Hamas, it is most likely incorrect to say that his racism made him hate Hamas.

Distrusting Kenya is certainly different.

Kenya is, to Europeans, African and foreign, but not usually known for severe human rights violations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Kenya

All-in-all it seems to be one of the most reliable African countries and one of the more reliable countries in general. I don't see a reason to distrust their judicial system when it comes to handling pirates.

Facts I know about Kenia: Lots of tourisms and safaris (I see the adds in the papers from time to time), former british colony, pretty stable - otherwise there wouldn't be so much tourism, they have really fast runners, had some political uprisings due to an election about a year ago or more which I didn't really follow that much because it IS in africa and far away and doesn't really concern my daily life.

You take some things too seriously, and also automatically assume that nobody knows anything anyway when it comes to the world. Piracy means that you steal something that doesn't belong to you and sell it on yourself or use it yourself. That is what traditional pirates did in the old times.

one could argue if the semantic use of piracy in regard to illegal copying of protected material under copyright law should be called piracy, but it has established itself as such. You can be like the french and make up a new term for it but I doubt that the world would readyl adopt your coinage. It's like the naming of the continent America. One cartographer from Freiburg simply called the continent that after Americo Vespuci while he was drawing a map because he didn't know what else to call it (new world was a bit of a mouthful) and because it is also custom to call places after people and so he simply wrote America on the map. Vespuci didn't want it, but the map had already been duplicated so many times and everybody called the new world america that his protest didn't have any effect. Once something takes hold its hard to get rid of.

That's usually a safe assumption.

 

That's neither what piracy means nor what "software pirates" do.

Piracy (real such) is not "stealing", it's roberry under war-like conditions. It's a much, much more serious crime than mere stealing.

"Software piracy" is neither robbery nor stealing and never has been. It is also not usually done under war-like conditions. It has traditionally been a much less serious crime than most others.

Piracy (real such) is illegal under common law without specific laws about it. "Software piracy" is only illegal if specific laws are made. For example, the US constitution does not provide a way to make piracy (real such) legal but does allow for congress to create (or not create) copyright laws.

The two (piracy, real such, and software piracy) are not only completely different types of crime, they are also both distinct from stealing.

 

Yeah, and a few years later people were fed up with living in Vespuccia and renamed the land "America".

That reminds me of the Eiffel Tower, named after its famous architect, Fred Tower.

 

well I heard a different anecdote, but I guess nobody really knows for sure. Your version is nice as well.

IMO piracy at sea should be dealt with harshly... their boat sunk and the crew (pirates) left or killed. Only then will it decline and stop. The world coddles criminals too much in the name of fairness. They understand what they are doing, so should expect the consequences.

Amen.

Or to put in in a way that even the most bleeding-heart liberal will understand: Every child in Africa that dies because we, the west, decided to spend money on feeding pirates instead, is one too many.