The how does matter. You can appreciate the removal of a despot and still oppose unilateral regime change by force–especially one so explicitly motivated by resource exploitation. This is very different from the UN-sanctioned and NATO-led intervention that deposed Gaddafi.

Would you describe China attacking North Korea or Cambodia or another SE Asian dictatorship to depose their leadership as “accidentally doing something right”?

It’s a common mistake to assume that gun buybacks are being proposed as a solution. The solutions being proposed are a set of laws/policies to tighten gun controls, like who’s allowed to buy guns, what guns are allowed to be owned and how many, improving checks and mitigating newer loopholes.

Tighter gun controls are shown to reduce mass shootings. In Australia, the laws have loosened a lot since the big wave of gun laws in 1996. The buyback program is a consequence of bringing people in line with the new laws.

The realistic goal is not to make it absolutely impossible for a motivated extremist with lots of resources to plan and commit a mass shooting, it’s to make it much harder to prepare to do and to create more opportunities to notice their preparation.

Some people who face reasonable trade-offs in doing so have a choice. Others who face unreasonable trade-offs have less of a choice. It’s usually quite difficult to tell when it’s a stranger you’re overhearing without making assumptions.

I think it echoes that video of those two Apache crews blowing up civilians in Baghdad and then targetting people who came to help the injured. One of the most chilling parts of that video was probably how casually routine it all seemed. Can only imagine what footage existed that never got leaked.

I agree, I’m separating the justification of the engagement from how they label people. So the parallel I’m drawing only has to do with how they loosely label people as part of a group based on broad characteristics once they decide a group can be a valid military target, i.e. “insurgents” or “narco-terrorists”.

Declaring drug smugglers as valid military targets is certainly new, but ordering strikes on military targets on the thin rationale of “hey, they look like the group we said we can hit” is not new for the US military.

If it’s not obvious, I disagree with both of these issues.

I agree, but it’s also consistent with how the US operates. Through Afghanistan’s and Iraq, anyone appearing as a military-aged male in the vicinity of an operation (e.g. a village where insurgents were shooting from) was labeled an enemy combatant and treated as valid targets.

I don’t know, I think adopting sanitary practices tops it easily.

I suspect survivability bias plays into it, as I imagine an empathetic and self-reflective anti-war film in the is more likely than a straight “US are the villains” film to be funded and see financial, and therefore popular, success in the US. It makes sense why domestic industries will tend to tell domestic-facing stories. I’d say the size of the US film industry means you actually get more diversity in war films compared to ones you see in places like Japan or Germany.

Depends on what class you are, which I think a lot of comments in this thread understandably seem to assume from a middle class perspective, even assuming “wage” as the main source of wealth.

Real estate is one major source of capital gains, but for a lot of the 1% and investors, capital gains is primarily from financial instruments, i.e. stocks, bonds, etc.

I’m sorry, either I’m dense or your explanation is confusing. How is what you described different from the capital gains tax?

Yeah, both possibilities mentioned are plausible. Some actual investigation and evidence tying him to the account are warranted.

Thanks for sharing that idea! I appreciate what you’re getting at: that basic care (food, clothing) embodies the tenet of equality in socialism. However, the example of a parent feeding a child doesn’t quite capture the power-relations, freedoms, and systems aspects of socialism. I don’t think we really want to say a master feeding/clothing their slave or a king feeding/clothing a favorite court jester is really “demonstrating socialism”. Socialism is about how society as a whole arranges ownership, production, and resource distribution (i.e. collective ownership of the means of production). It’s a counter to capitalism.

Parental relationships are, ironically, a special case where limiting freedoms and greater power disparity are justified in most egalitarian systems. We usually don’t give children ownership over the means of production.

Good formal description: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socialism

So if socialism is bad because it’s in the name of Nazis, then democratic republics for the people must be pretty horrible too, going by the DPRK.

While we’re cherry-picking, the Kingdom of Norway is consistently one of the best countries to live in across several metrics. So clearly we should go back to kingdoms, because it’s in the name. Sometimes the old ways are best XD

Well, my friend, I’m glad you’re not disputing the point, despite the poor comparison. I wish you peace and love :)

The comparison I’m making is to Nazi Germany’s war for global domination. So yes, there was Jewish armed resistance in occupied Europe. Now, I don’t condone Hamas’s massacre of civilians and hostage taking. I do believe Palestinians have a right to armed resistance in the face of Israel’s control over Palestinian sovereignty and the continued extreme injustices they’ve been inflicting on Palestinians collectively.

I was pointing to a distinction in the logic of “rightness”. If you ignore morality, then yes, eradicating a population will effectively stop groups within it from continuing to attack you in the future. However, with morality, genocide is wrong. It’s the same reason why wiping Israel off the map would finish things and end the IDF’s war crimes. However, it would still be morally wrong.

By that logic, Hitler/Nazis should have finished the job too so there would be world peace. If millenia of history and the present is anything to go by, nations keep going to war with each other, so coexistence will never work in the long term.

No, the vertical spit and the term doner kebab is traced back to Bursa in the 1800s, with offshoots into shawarma and gyros thereafter. It wasn’t until the 1970s that German Döner Kebab evolved in Berlin.

The article literally refers to the Traditional Specialty Guarantee label in the second sentence. They want to treat it like Pizza Napoletana or Serrano Ham, but it’s too general for that now.

Someone wants to buy US soy farms for cheap.