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6 months agoThe “well-regulated militia” part afterwards isn’t vague, but gets ignored by self-proclaimed “originalists”.
DdCno1
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Joined 11 months ago
Cake day: December 18th, 2023
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They go after this platform, because it’s a favorite of mass shooters. You know this.
The AR-15 is designed for hunting humans, not game.
At least in China’s case, the harassment extends to ethnically Chinese people who have lived their entire lives abroad and never set foot in China.
This appears to be the new norm among autocratic regimes (although it isn’t all that new - think of Trotsky, for example, or the infamous umbrella murder).
Vietnam is doing this as well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tr%E1%BB%8Bnh_Xu%C3%A2n_Thanh
https://rsf.org/en/dissident-exile-stops-blogging-because-family-vietnam-being-hounded
Eritrea, a regime that is similarly repressive as North Korea, but far less known, is also notorious for this:
Saudi Arabia is among the worst in this regard:
https://freedomhouse.org/report/transnational-repression/saudi-arabia
I’m getting the impression that liberal democracies housing refugees and dissidents from autocratic regimes are unprepared to counter these threats. It is our responsibility to protect people seeking refuge and this includes proactive action against governments that seek to extend their violent rule outside of their borders.
It wouldn’t be a Republican ban if it wasn’t tackling a fictional “issue”.
Apples and (lab-grown) oranges.
You would think that millions of global COVID deaths that he (and Xi - but nobody is allowed to vote that idiot out of office) is primarily responsible for would finally keep people from voting for the “it can’t get any worse” guy.
COVID-19 killed almost three times as many Americans as died during WW2 due to both inaction and deliberate malicious actions. This alone should have resulted in a prison sentence for Trump and his inner circle.
The durability of electric car batteries is far better than expected. Even in the case of early models with extremely basic battery packs and no active cooling (e.g. Nissan Leaf), the packs almost always outlast the cars they’re built into:
Maintenance of EVs in general is far simpler than on ICE cars. There’s a much smaller number of components. Almost everything related to the drivetrain is practically maintenance-free.
I bought masks from a toy company (Playmobil) for my family, because there was literally nothing else available anywhere. They were marketed as alternatives to basic paper masks though, not N95 masks:
https://i.imgur.com/Sbq4oBq.jpeg
The innovation was that you could use tissue paper as filters and reuse the silicone mask after cleaning it. They were uncomfortable and stinky, but functional. We used these for about a month or two, long before any vaccines were available. I suspect that social distancing protected us far more than the masks, but either way, none of us got infected.
Stereoscopic camera systems exist and they can work very well (like on my ten year old car).
Seems like you’re unlucky. Subaru’s system is generally considered one of the best in the industry, routinely outperforming the competition.
Better pick an early electric car, because the days of ICE cars being allowed into cities are numbered.
Meanwhile my ten year old Smart produces just one or two false alerts per year. It’s a simple camera-based system, yet it works incredibly well. The lane departure warning works equally well. Both are so effective that I never want to drive a car without these systems again.
It’s an inherent issue with deep learning. Awareness of this among people who are regularly using these tools is very low, which is troubling.
https://umdearborn.edu/news/ais-mysterious-black-box-problem-explained
Reminder that DNA evidence is nowhere near as flawless of an instrument as portrayed by crime shows and the news media. Like all other forensics, it’s a matter of interpretation and likelihoods, far less reliable than you might think. Here’s a good overview of the many issues with it:
https://daily.jstor.org/forensic-dna-evidence-can-lead-wrongful-convictions/
That’s also not at all what’s going on here.
No, never.
I also don’t think this is a genocide. It’s “merely” the most televised (the word that would have been used in the past) war in history, one that overshadows far worse conflicts like the Sudanese Civil War in our public consciousness. The war in Gaza is the first war most people who are claiming that this is a genocide are closely following (if watching Russian, Chinese, Iranian and Palestinian propaganda on social media can be called closely following), thus the outrage. Most people have been isolated from the horrors of war, most, including on the Lemmyverse, have no idea how to process what’s going on, most have no idea about international law concerning warfare, shouting ignorantly that every single conventional act of war is automatically a war crime, provided it’s Israel who is doing it - and almost all people are completely blind to the wider geopolitical behind the scenes game that is at play here.
Just to name one aspect that I’ve rarely seen discussed, isn’t it odd that South Africa of all countries filed the frivolous lawsuit against Israel at the ICJ while at nearly the exact same time hosting Hamas and war criminals who have been far more credibly accused of committing genocide? This can only be partially explained by at best dubious historic analogies and past connections with the PLO.
Note that I’m not denying that individual Israeli soldiers are committing war crimes. Of course that’s happening and they should be punished for it. Settler crimes are a huge issue as well and the Israeli state needs to come down hard on these people - but what these individuals with at most tacit approval from parts of the government are doing is at worst attempted displacement. I’m not denying the abhorrent conditions civilians in the Gaza strip are suffering from due to the war, but as the successful evacuation corridor created for Palestinian civilians and defended by the IDF against Hamas attacks has shown, there is a clear and obvious divide between this almost comically evil fictional IDF that people have invented and the actual actions of it as an organization, between it and Hamas.
What I am extremely doubtful of is that there is a deliberate and systematic campaign of extermination against the Palestinian people. It just doesn’t add up. I’ve studied several real genocides and the patterns that unite all of them are completely different from this war. There is no legal disenfranchisement of Palestinians living in Israel - in fact, the opposite has happened in recent years. There is no drop in birth rates, like we are seeing in Xinjiang among the Uyghurs, with the Palestinian population growing at a far greater rate than Israel’s and consistently so. There is no systematic dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli media and education - at worst some far-right individuals are saying deplorable things which do not represent the consensus within Israeli society. An army committing genocide does also not spend an inordinate amount of resources on warning systems for civilians they are allegedly trying to exterminate. Why would they send flyers and text messages, call, hack TV stations, provide websites with info on which areas are less dangerous and even invent the costly and to the Israeli military detrimental warning method of roof-knocking if they were trying to kill as many Palestinians? It doesn’t make any sense.
One aspect that surprised me about this conflict is just how easily well-meaning people can be programmed to repeat a small handful of propaganda talking points, a frightening spectacle to witness during the ramp-up of a major war in Asia and a series of defeats for Ukraine. It’s one thing to witness similar patterns among far- and alt-right people who have no principles - but more left-leaning people usually do (I should know), which makes us particularly impervious to changing opinions that we believe are based on the moral high ground.
The effect of a combined disinformation campaign by Russia, Iran and China are practically overwhelming the West, at least in part with the help of the shockingly effective Trojan Horse that is TikTok. You wouldn’t believe how frequently I’ve come across the exact same “75 years of Israeli occupation” and other false and misleading sound bites. This one in particular has become such a meme that nobody is even updating it to the current year - and nobody who is blindly spouting it has even heard of Egyptian and Syrian occupation of Palestine (one of my least favorite interactions involved educating and Egyptian about this, which went back and forth a few times, until he doubled down on his denial of Egyptian occupation and declared that the entirety of Wikipedia was Western propaganda"), but I digress. It’s the same with the genocide allegations, which few people I’ve come across are even trying to suppor
I used this source, which lists aid for every year:
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/total-u-s-foreign-aid-to-israel-1949-present
One of the most convincing tricks he pulled off was transporting two people from the stage to what looked like a believable beach. Totally fooled me (but I was a kid when I watched it).
Edit: I started to figure out that something was amiss soon after, because every single one of the supposedly “random” people he invited on stage to do his tricks with (usually by throwing plastic balls into the audience) wore incredibly “inoffensive” and poorly fitted clothes. At some point, I was able to spot which people he would end up picking from a mile away even before he had done so.