I was commenting on the general situation of “are you justified in treating someone brandishing a weapon as a lethal threat?”, not the specifics of this situation. I haven’t seen the video, so won’t comment on whether this person specifically was brandishing or not.

I use it to spitball programming ideas, which I’ve found it decent for. I can write something like “I’m building XYZ, and I’m considering structuring my program as A or B. Give me a rundown on pros, cons, and best-practice for the different approaches.”

A lot of what I get back is self-evident or not very relevant, but sometimes I get some angles I hadn’t really considered. Most of all, actually formulating my problems/ideas is a good way for me to get my thought process going. Essentially, I’m “discussing” with it as I would with an inexperienced colleague, just without actually trusting what it tells me.

Yes, I also have a rubber duck on my desk, but he’s usually most helpful when I’m debugging.

Brandishing a weapon is not the same as carrying it. Brandishing is what you do when moving the firearm in a way that indicates you are threatening to shoot. In the worst case, it involves pointing the firearm at someone.

If someone purposely points a firearm at you, you have every right to fire in self defence. At least those were the rules of engagement we were taught regarding interactions with civilians at home when I was in the army.

I read about some military experts that were interviewed by a Norwegian paper. They essentially said that Israel is doing its best to chip away at Irans nuclear capabilities from several sides: Targeting everything from scientists to electric infrastructure, to centrifuges and the facilities themselves.

However, they seemed to think it was completely unrealistic that Israel would be able to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons by military means. They even speculated that even the Israelis don’t see it as realistic, but that they’re attacking in an attempt to delay the inevitable and hopefully drag the US into the war before it happens.

A point they made is that the facility at Fordow is too deep to be reached even with the world’s heaviest bunker-busters. Iran is apparently also working on a new facility that will also be ≈ 100 m deep in the mountain.

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

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.

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.

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”.

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.

Without checking out the details, I can say with fairly high confidence that a material that will be degraded by a sodium chloride solution will most likely also be degraded by other electrolytes as well.

However, the electrolyte-concentration in drinks is much, much lower than that in seawater. And if it can’t be used for electrolyte-containing drinks, it could be used for water bottles.

Maybe we could use this stuff for umbrellas too? My major concern is what this new material is broken down into.

I’m unable to fathom how someone is able to harm or kill their children or family. I literally cannot comprehend how someone has that in them.

That’s not the point though. The point is that this isn’t a one-off occurrence. It’s terrifying how often people end up murdering their spouse and/or children, it happens somewhere in the world every day, and has been documented to happen throughout history. Thus, it’s clear that even though most of us can’t even comprehend how anyone could do something like this, it’s reductionist to write it off as “inhuman”. It’s very clear that a terrifying amount of people have it in them to do something like this under the correct circumstances. Most of those people probably couldn’t even imagine how anyone could commit a crime like this before they themselves do it.

It’s sickening, and it’s evil, but it’s very clearly a human behaviour. I still have an urge to call it “inhuman” because the behaviour is so unimaginable to me, as it is for most people.

And the glory of the interwebz is that those 5000 people are bound to find each other and start a movement around it, where just 25 years ago they would have been laughed out of the local pub as a raving idiot…

Oh, they’re absolutely selling weapons to war criminals that use them to commit crimes, I 100 % agree.

Just wanted to clarify that “persuing fleeing targets” isn’t a war crime, it’s the targeting of civilians itself that is. Your statement,

It’s unreal that they can just say “We design war crimes”

Made it sound like you thought chasing down fleeing targets was itself a war crime, regardless who the target was.

I can see there being some changes to laws of war, or at least interpretation in response to drone warfare. Specifically, there’s a law against “causing unnecessary suffering” which prevents the use of weapons designed with the intent to maim rather than kill. Most countries have banned anti-personnel mines, and use this as part of the reasoning (another being the non-directed nature of the weapons, and long-term effects after the war is over).

Drone-dropped grenades have a clear tendency to wound rather than kill, and I can see an argument that when infantry throw grenades they usually follow up with gunfire rather than leaving the enemy in a field. With this in mind, I can see an argument against drone-dropped light grenades. Then again, drone-dropped grenades give such a massively asymmetric advantage that I have a hard time seeing any army giving them up.