Online scams have become a big problem, especially for older people. Fall for an email pretending to be from your bank, sometimes followed up by a phone call, and suddenly people authorize transferring all their money from their bank account. But the problem does not lie with those who fall for the scams, it lies with the companies and government entities that keep copying everything scammers do.
We can start all the way back 25+ years ago, when spammers got tired of getting blocked, instead of using their real email address, they would use some form of noreply@ address. No legitimate company would ever do that, they want their customers to be able to contact them. That could result in loss of potential sales because your customers gave up trying to contact you.
Another example, here in Denmark in the 1990's, the government introduced a digital signature in the form of a public and private key. At least one entity that made use of the digital signature wrote their own Java applet, which rather than having the user confirm their identity with the private key demanded access to the private key itself. Exactly what a scammer would do to compromise your key.
After that fiasco, they tried a model with a bunch of one time keys on a piece of paper. That made it easy to scam people if they could be convinced to enter the correct one time key on a website controlled by the scammer. So people were told that nobody would ever send out an email asking them to click a link and log in with a one time key. Well, as it turned out, nobody except the Danish tax authority.
And to go back in time once more, back in the day there was a lot of viagra-spam. But that was easy to filter out, most people don't receive a log of email containing the word "viagra". So spammers started replacing letters with numbers, and we started seeing it spelled "v!agra" and similar. It may have fooled the spam filter, but to a person it was easy to recognize. No legitimate mail or notification would use a spelling like "v!agra" or "s!renen"… Right?
When every red flag gets turned into a "best practice", the scammers job becomes easy. Too easy.
| Nazis | Russians |
|---|---|
| Used the excuse "historical German land" for invading Austria. | Used the excuse "historical Russian land" for invading Ukraine. |
| Had the Catholic church on their side. | Have the Russian Orthodox Church on their side. |
| Arrested people for being LGBT. | Arrest people for being LGBT. |
| Bombed civilian targets in London and elsewhere. | Bomb civilian targets in Kyiv and elsewhere. |
| Had a strong leader who was "elected", at least on paper | Have a strong leader who was "elected", at least on paper |
Conclusion: Yeah, Ukraine does need to be de-nazified.
Imagine a system where schools have a zero tolerance policy against fighting, but bullies are almost glorified, especially if the bully is also on the football team. Which they are, because football is the perfect sport for someone who likes hurting others. Bullying (glorified) only becomes fighting (zero tolerance) the moment the victim hits back. This would feel a lot like the school punishing the victim.
Add on top of this a culture of "the only one who can stop a bad guy is a good guy with a gun". The result easily becomes the only one who can stop a bully is a victim with a gun. Especially when said culture also hands out guns like they were candy.
Is it really a surprise that this combination results in school shootings?
Maybe the problem is really not guns - or rather, not only guns. Maybe it's every part of the system and culture working together as if the whole purpose was to create school shootings…
White pizza with garlic oil, cheese, mushrooms and herbs.
