My comment was removed for “advocating violence”, so I’ll try to make myself clear:

First of all, I did not intend to advocate violence.

I was trying to advocate that people be vocal about the fact that there is a certain amount of violent suppression they will tolerate before they turn to violent resistance.

This isn’t about condoning violence. It’s about loudly warning the authorities about what often happens when protesters are suppressed using unwarranted force.

Furthermore, it’s about recognising that everyone has a right to self defence, and making the authorities aware of that. If the police open fire on innocent civilians, they have a right to fight back. If the police beat a peaceful protester, they have a right to fight back. If unidentified people attempt to illegally arrest a protester, they have a right to fight back. The authorities have said things that make it appear as if they haven’t recognised this, and I’m advocating that they be made aware of it.

This means:

• Loudly inform the authorities of your right to assemble and express yourself.
• Loudly inform the authorities of your right to defend yourself using force if those rights are infringed upon.
• Use violence only as an absolutely last resort.

Removed by mod

Hard disagree. I work a lot with numbers, both hand-written and typed. I’ve yet to come across a situation where spaces are not sufficiently clear for readability. Using spaces for separation has never been an issue with letters, why would it be an issue with numbers?

“Managed” in the sense that crimes could only really be resolved if you had witnesses, and “managed” in the sense that it was far more common for people to be wrongly convicted. Photo and video evidence are pretty crucial to having modern crime resolution rates.

As if an organised military of any kind has any hope of winning a guerrilla war in one of the largest, most populous, and most heavily armed countries on earth.

The ability of the American people to defeat the American army in a revolution is solely dependent on their willingness to take casualties. It’s been shown time and again that a massively superior army like the US really isn’t able to deal with a war where enemy combatants are also the civilian population. An exception is Israel in Gaza, where they’ve decided to just level everything to the ground, and massacre the civilians.

Modern vaccines are in fact so effective that they’re endangering themselves. Because “no one” is seeing the horrors that vaccines prevent, people have grown sceptical that they’re necessary in the first place.

I’m honestly leaning towards “skull fuckingly dumb”, combined with a reckoning of how few idiots it takes to break the system.

Kennedy is a well established moron, so I don’t doubt for a second that he could do this simply out of stupidity. A problem of its own is that a person appointed by the president (rather than hired by a qualified board) can even do this in the first place.

I’ll be honest: It’s complete insanity to use commas within a number. If you need laughably high precision, use spaces for readability. If you need a lot of zeros, use power notation.

There is no excuse for putting commas in a number. I rest my case.

When the government unlawfully incarcerates people, whose responsibility is it to step up and free them?

The social contract that is a state gives the state a monopoly on violence, allowing the state to revoke individual freedom if an individual breaks certain laws. If the state starts abusing that monopoly you have a certain window to oppose it before opposition becomes hopeless.

Once the government has shown that it will incarcerate dissidents, it’s only a matter of time until enough dissidents are incarcerated that no one else sticks their neck out. “Right now” is the window you have until this happens. The government’s monopoly on violence needs to be broken when they abuse it, which means today. Explicitly, this means that if unlawfully incarcerated people are not broken out by force, this only gets worse.

Thanks for this! I want kids myself, and constantly see people online being so negative to the idea, it’s nice to see someone here being positive to it.

To me, it’s quite simple: I really want kids. Have wanted for years. It’s probably a biological urge more than anything else, but I find myself daydreaming about playing with my kids, taking them camping, and showing them how to build a treehouse.

We’ve accepted that there will never be an “optimal” time to have kids, so at this point we’re kind of just “waiting for it to happen” (i.e. not actively preventing kids from showing up).

There are people out there moralising about how it’s irresponsible to bring kids into this world, and I honestly couldn’t care less what they think. I’m confident that I can give my kids a good life, that they’ll be glad they were born, and that they will bring a lot of joy to the world.

We had US troops doing rotations in Norway long before we made a deal allowing US jurisdiction on certain bases.

It’s quite (very) common to give some degree of immunity to visiting allied soldiers. Often, this involves that they will be tried by courts in their home country if they are accused of a crime.

These new deals are a whole different matter. They give full jurisdiction to the US inside their bases. The major argument against them is essentially that they undermine Norwegian sovereignty on Norwegian soil. For example, we have laws prohibiting storage of nuclear weapons on our soil, but if the US lands a plane carrying nukes on one of these bases, we have signed away our right to inspect them. Even if we knew they carried nukes, we’ve signed away our right to seize them and send them out.

My personal opinion is that these deals are a major infraction on Norwegian sovereignty, and are possibly unconstitutional for that reason.

While I generally agree that dissatisfaction != anger, soldiers who are repeatedly given orders they know are bullshit and that they strongly disagree with typically tend to get pissed at the people issuing those orders.

To be fair to the soldiers here: I can understand that a soldier who is tasked with guarding a federal building has trouble judging whether or not that is an illegal order. As a good example, deploying NG to the capitol on J6 would not have been giving illegal orders.

There is a line between legal “guarding federal property and persons” and “displacing the police to illegally suppress protests”.

Oh, absolutely. The best option is of course to have enough of everything. However, the past 20 years we’ve seen a bunch of western militaries phase out a bunch of their older, simpler equipment in favour of a few high-tech systems.

I think my point is that it may be a mistake to discard large volumes of older systems and replace them with a few new systems. If/when a war happens, we’re going to need large volumes of simpler gear as well as the few specialised and modern systems we’ve developed the past 20 years.

I do believe most western armies have gone a bit too far into “a few advanced” over “many simple”.

If I’m going to war I would prefer to have 200 Leopard 2A4 with me over having 20 Leopard 2A8. Same goes for aircraft: I would rather have 100 F16 than 10 F35. If only because a realistic war has a long front, and those few pieces of advanced equipment can’t be everywhere at once.

We shouldn’t forget that during WWII, the allies typically had the technologically inferior armour, but won out because it was easier to build and maintain, and they had more of it.

This looks like a turning point in European defence production. When civilian manufacturers begin directly contributing to the defence industry we may be on the verge of massive increases in military production.

What drove western production to obscene highs during WWII was exactly this shift.

Whatever anyone China-affiliated says they’re not doing, it’s a safe bet that’s exactly what they’re doing.

I’m not going to push any conspiracy theories, but I believe the strongest evidence pointing towards Covid-19 originating in a lab is the Chinese government insisting that it didn’t, while prohibiting anyone not under their control from investigating. That doesn’t mean it did originate from a lab, but if anything, that’s what it points to. To be explicit: My impression is that, currently, most available evidence points towards natural origins. However the Chinese government has done its best to convince me otherwise.

This is a case where you have to be careful about cause-effect order. I assume that Tiwanese people that are heavily opposed to China are more likely to avoid tiktok. But of course, it’s been shown that tiktok tends to show more pro-China “content” as well, and likely influences the opinions of its users.

To be fair, this was originally the point of plastic. The primary point of plastic today is that it is an extremely cheap material that you can mould into pretty much any shape.

Need a bag to carry stuff? Plastic.

Packaging for toothpicks? Plastic.

Spacers inside an electric circuit? Plastic.

Packaging for clothes? Plastic.

Fake plant? Plastic.

Part of the problem is that we’re using a wonder-material that lasts forever (plastic) for a bunch of mundane shit where we don’t need it, because that wonder-material turns out to be the cheapest material around as well.

If you read the article, you’ll find that they claim it’s broken down into something which is processed by naturally occurring bacteria. I would have preferred that they linked to an actual research article for details, but this is explicitly not one of these “degradable” plastics that just dissolves into microplastic.