Executive dysfunction go brrr

One, it does give some room to dismiss accusations, even if just rhetorically.

Two, when you are able to coerce your subjects to say the sky is green, the sun sets in the East, and Dear Leader won the election, its an exercise of power over them. It feeds the ego and it becomes a litmus test for the disloyal.

It probably was fake. I’d imagine the people who are selected for these assignments are borderline or complete sociopaths who don’t have problems putting their mission above their entanglements.

If these kids are old enough to have any sense they aught to flee the first chance they get.

As an American I think that would all be reasonable…if the official US position was that Mexico has no right to exist, the Mexican people should be forcibly integrated into our society as 2nd class citizens, and the US Army was in the process of a “peacekeeping operation” in Mexico to carry all this out.

For all our flaws, we respect the borders of our neighbors and don’t have irridentist aspirations that belong in the 19th century. Russia is the aggressor here, and they have demonstrated that they have little interest in global peace or human rights, only increasing their sphere of influence.

Continually rolling over for thugs because it’s what avoids nuclear conflict will only lead to a global order based on thuggery, and it likely won’t even avoid nuclear conflict in the end.

And conservative voters see any measure to tackle this issue, no matter how benign, as “weak liberal nonsense” and “a waste of time” that cheapens our fighting ability. Of course I’m sure their hearts are set on what’s best for our military, and not that they’re sexist, racist abusers who don’t want their sexist, racist abuse to be challenged.

This issue goes back at least as far as living memory for the US. We were particularly vicious to German women at the end of WWII. GI’s having illegitimate children with local women in Asia during our multiple wars there was so common it’s basically a trope.

I’ve thought about this a lot. I think its more the sheer oversaturation of “culture” than it is a true lack of imagination. People alive today consume exponentially greater amounts of “culture” (for the broadest term possible) than anyone ever before, and it’s not even close.

When tech enables you to experience a movie or a video game or a performer 30 years after the death of everyone involved, in essentially the same fidelity as the day it debuted, “old culture” has a much harder time making way for “new culture.” If Star Wars exists, why care about Rebel Moon or whatever that movie was called?

I think the public consciousness can only maintain cognizance and interest in so much, but at the same time creatives are constantly adding to the Culture Pile. But the more tech enables us to hold on to our past, it becomes more and more difficult to move on, and the majority of new stuff goes unwanted and unappreciated. And so the mass market dives into keeping the old alive with reboots, remakes, remasters, and now AI recreations, because that’s what people respond to.

They wanted to impede the soft power of China in the region. It does make sense in a realpolitik kind of way, but someone with a fucking conscience in the command chain should have stopped this.

The only thing Bethesda is motivated to do, frothing, absolutely chomping at the bit, is figure out a way to successfully monetize modded content.

No, they absolutely used it as a ground-attack incendiary and have admitted as such. They were not flushed out by being illuminated, they were flushed out with choking smoke and burning shit raining down on their positions.

Even if they did only use illumination flares, there are considerations against using them in civilian areas in ways that can start fires or otherwise cause injury to civilians.

The legal issue is moot because the US was not an adherent to these laws until 2009.

The US used the same weapons in Fallujah and likely elsewhere. They called it “shake and bake” when they first fired WP artillery to draw enemy fighters out, then followed up with conventional artillery to kill them.

Nobody can hold the US accountable, so they’re not going to hold their rabid dog accountable either.

Even back then, once the public support died down a bit they just had the NYPD bulldoze the whole thing. Since then the police have only gotten more brazenly violent against protests that are not in the establishment’s interests.

Shit will get “wild” when instead of picket signs and bullhorns, people start bringing rifles and pipe bombs. Otherwise the outcome of any meaningful protest will be the same no matter how many people show up: an unforgiving police crackdown.

And naturally it’s a reverse-engineered BD Spot, likely even down to the software. Why put money into R&D when your adversaries do it for you?

A lot of the pilgrims were the fundamentalist crazies that Europe didn’t want, and the towns they founded had laws like this and more.

AI’s most successful accomplishment is going to be its ability to parse the astronomical amounts of personal data corporations and governments have been collecting for the last 20 years. Enshittification and the identification, surveillance, and targeting of dissidents.

To me, the wording of the Israeli statement implies it was them, though of course it’s not 100% certain. If they had even the flimsiest proof to pin it on Hamas they would go public with it immediately.

A solar storm of that scale wouldn’t just take down Facebook and Twitter for a while, it could destroy critical power infrastructure around the globe that would take months to repair. People would die.

Last I knew they called the Russia-Ukraine war the “NATO War in Ukraine” and claimed Russia killed over 10,000 “NATO mercenaries” mostly from Germany.

Didn’t the Serbian legislative body fucking gas themselves with CS a few years back?

They need to get people to believe that the security theater is working to protect them (it doesn’t), otherwise they might start to question why it’s there in the first place. Hint: it’s not to protect the public from terrorists.

That specifically is a valid concern for training ammunition where massive quantities end up being fired into relatively small firing ranges over the years, making the land more or less permanently contaminated with heavy metals and toxic residues from explosives. I doubt ammo for the “real world” will have the same requirements.