Structural issues make egalitarian economic systems difficult. Wealth and social influence compound once another in a virtuous cycle. Wealth has a strong hereditary bias, even in socialist economic models. And violence is historically a powerful tool for accruing wealth. Very difficult to establish universal deterrence against violence.

This isn’t a question of people being smart or stupid. It’s an elaborate balancing act that becomes exponentially more difficult as population size expands.

China’s HSR network is (largely by necessity to make sure there is a large enough migrant workforce available to break any worker organizing)

Is there any actual correlation between HSR and labor organizing? It seems like you pulled that out of nowhere.

I don’t care about your insults

Keep saying that. Maybe you can get someone to believe it

Donnie Deals

What if China’s domestic policy is centered on public high speed mass transit, not individual car ownership?

Your insults mean nothing to me.

Spilling a lot of ink to suggest otherwise

If you look at the wikipedia page on defensive gun use, you see that since it’s not centrally tracked and many go unreported

The definition of “defensive use” ranges from “discharged weapon at assailant” to “announced possession of weapon at scary noise”. So much of it relies on taking police reports at face value, no questions asked.

But the real issue IMHO, which is unfortunately not tracked AFAIK, is how many gun crimes are committed with legal guns. IE, legally purchased/owned guns by a non-prohibited gun owner. That IMHO is some data that would really help settle the issue.

I haven’t seen anything to suggest legality of ownership translates to defensiveness of use.

And none of this addresses the central problem of gun ownership - suicide. You are the person most likely to be killed by your own gun.

it’s better than the rest of TX that I can find. I’m open to suggestions.

Texas Tribune is still good, even if they’ve been on the downswing due to budget cuts. Houston Landing might have been good, but it flamed out when they couldn’t find enough advertisers or build a subscription base fast enough. I enjoyed City Cast Houston from time to time, but they’re gone now.

sigh

I forgot Propublica

They’re definitely good.

All the other times you attacked your allies?

It’s sort of our thing

This has got to be the stupidest comment you’ve said in our entire exchange

Brother, if you don’t want to learn about this country’s history, that’s on you. But your need to scream “Stupid!” every time I say something you don’t want to hear isn’t an indictment of my intelligence, just your maturity.

YMMV for a lot of these. The Guardian is notoriously transphobic. The AP and Reuters are a grab bag of real news coverage and naked propaganda pieces. Big City Papers are inevitably mouthpieces of the local reactionary billionaire, leaning heavily on the “If It Bleeds It Leads” rule of thumb.

My own local paper - the Houston Chronicle - is lousy with native advertising and reactionary hot takes.

Not the worst paper in the world, but this town used to have no less than six major periodicals of record. They were all strangled by media consolidation. And the last paper standing is barely more than a coupon book for the real estate industry, with a conservative newsletter spliced in.

That’s been the US modus operandi since Truman.

If you think this is a feasible sane approach

It’s no more feasible or sane than any of our other adventurist wars. But it’s crazy to think the Europeans are willing to play the role of Punching Bad to our Imperial Iron Fist. If the US is serious about taking Greenland, the Europeans will back out of the way. Because the US is an enormous, horrifying killing machine and Greenland simply isn’t worth that kind of heat.

The world will turn to China and trash the US economy instantly.

European reactionaries will be on the side of the US - just like Canadians were in the last election cycle - and they’ll likely eat some shit for it in the short term. But the US will continue to pump the continent full of white nationalist propaganda. The liberal European leadership will continue to let it happen. And the reactionaries will win in the end when liberals roll over a few years later.

“Shooting and crying” (Hebrew: יורים ובוכים, romanized: yorim ve bochim) is an expression used to describe books, films or other forms of media that portray soldiers expressing remorse for actions they undertook during their service. It has often been associated with a practice that some former Israel Defense Force soldiers follow.

Gil Hochberg described “shooting and crying” as a soldier being “sorry for things I had to do.” This “non-apologetic apology” was the self-critique model advanced in Israel in many politically reflective works of literature and cinema as “a way of maintaining the nation’s self-image as youthful and innocent. Along with its sense of vocation against the reality of war, growing military violence, occupation, invasion, [there was] […] an overall sense that things were going wrong.”

How do you believe the Axis power will occupy Greenland?

Same way they do it anywhere else. A month of artillery bombardment on every hospital, church, and elementary school with a “Fighting Age Male” in line of sight until everyone in the country is afraid to step outside the house.

Send in the jackboots to take major ports and city centers, then loot the surrounding area of valuables.

Start paying half the surviving population a bounty of bread and cigarettes for every “insurgent” scalp they bring in, and set off a civil war that scars the country for a century.

Then fall back to a Green Zone and use anyone left for target practice with your latest AI powered weapons system.

Write the territory off as “ungovernable” in fifteen years, and have your retired grunts sign a multi-million dollar book/movie deal called “Snowmobile Heroes: Liberation Victory Patrol”

Five Eyes down by at least two

my grandfather ran up the beaches of Normandy

Then he’d have told you how much of a bloody mess taking a beach head is with 1930s equipment. Again, nobody in Europe actually wants that noise. That’s why there was no major European intervention in Ukraine. Y’all just let the Ukrainians piss away their best and brightest as cannon fodder while up-selling them on Wundertanken that got stuck in the mud.

You have no concept of suffering during war.

If I didn’t, I’d be significantly more blase about a military engagement in Greenland.

I’ll spot you Trump has no concept, and will presumably fling every member of JSOC into the meat grinder if he thinks it’ll win him a 51st state and a Nobel Prize in Bribing The Right People. But the fact that folks in the EU do seem to have a meaningful contingent of anti-war locals would suggest they aren’t thrilled with the prospect of sending their kids and grandkids to die over an oversized ice cube.

There’s simply no appetite for this shit, which is why Trump (very rightly) believes he can take Greenland without a serious fight. That’s the nature of imperialism. The cost of opposing the empire is astronomically higher than the cost of acquiesce, so people tend to duck their heads until the pain is intolerable. And Greenland isn’t painful enough to fight over.

I suspect you have puddle-deep insight into global economic dependencies, the fragility of the US economy, the EU + Canada Arctic warfare capabilities, and the likely outcome of an invasion of a northern neighboring country that looks like you, sounds like you, and can hide in plain sight or hop over the indefensible border to bring violence to your homes.

Now say it in German.

Peter Thiel, Steven Miller, and David Navaro, by the look of things.

Serious question: how will a carrier group fare in arctic ice during winter?

Climate change has made this a receding problem, which is one reason why Greenland is suddenly hot property. In another ten years, you may be able to sail the perimeter of Greenland fully unobstructed all year round.

An answer: they can take it, but when winter comes, holding it will be difficult.

Holding it from whom? Nobody in NATO actually has the stomach for the kind of losses they’d take.