The 2nd amendment types are a little too impressionable for their guns to be of much use. They were soundly defeated in 5th generation warfare without the need to fire nary a shot. Less gullible americans tend to not own guns, so they were also defeated without firing nary a shot. Now America is just a big dumb worm that Netanyahu has his hooks in and uses to cruise around the desert with.
Guns are not only for counter-insurgency on invasion/warfare. For most people I know who own guns, that's not even on their top 10 list of reasons. But if you don't think they'd be a factor, then you disagree with some of the top generals around the world.
Civilian guns (armament generally, not just guns) aren't for going toe to toe with a trained military in the field.
They're for putting a bullet in you and/your your family if you act as a collaborator, taking potshots at the logistics train, and all the other nasty stuff you have to do to make occupation costly in terms of both life and dollars. Every cent spent on putting bullet proof glass in the camera installation van and drone cages on the police station and using those cameras and drones to track down the guy who shot you for collaborating is a cent that must be extracted from either the occupied population or the population that's financing the occupiers and not spent in direct pursuit of the political goal.
Yeah when you read it in Dune "He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing". sounds super cool and badass and like totally brilliant strategy but in real life not so much.
Although I expect this strategy will be employed soon
Unless it's a very limited nuclear war, it would probably destroy the world as we know it, but that's a vague and flexible concept. It would likely destroy countries, societies, our way of life. Many people would die, but humanity would survive.
Some countries might survive. If the war takes place on the northern hemisphere, the southern hemisphere might be much less affected.
I agree. My much more limited point was that we don't actually have enough nukes to glass the planet; but I could probably have made that more explicitly.
Not sure sterilisation lasts long on earth: life re-claims sterilised areas.
See your favourite massive volcano outbreak, or look at the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
(The impact of the disaster at Chernobyl is much smaller in area than a nuclear explosion would be, of course. But life has re-conquered everything there.)
It might be worth noting that the number of direct deaths caused by Chernobyl is very low (2 perhaps?). But there have been hundreds of thousands of birth defects in its wake.
The survivors of nuclear war would have a really bad time, but humanity would survive.
None of this is to suggest we should be careless about it; it would be a massive disaster. But not the end.
Usually when people are seeking advice they aren't really seeking advice, they're seeking confidence. They already know they need to make changes, and are seeking the confidence to make them.
Authoritarianism is a spectrum and all states are on it. We all have brain slugs now, it was voluntary. We'll be going back to that old time religion, but with a new twist. With AI every man will, in a much more literal way, be able to have an ongoing private conversation with god. And you won't need money or the government anymore. God has a special plan for you and you follow it.
My buddy with no arms or legs would beg to differ. He can't afford taxis because he can't work a real job. His friends/family can't drive him around because you need a custom vehicle for his chair. But he can use bike lanes and sidewalks independently without too muuch trouble.
Car-dependent sprawl creates mobility impaired people where there were previously none. Many people are too old, too young, too intoxicated, too vision impaired or too poor to drive. Lack of viable transportation options is the greatest barrier to upward economic mobility for Americans today.
The Owens river gorge has the highest concentration of sport climbs anywhere in North America, but there's not much variation, they're mostly edge ladders on weirdly slippery rock.
Not far away are the world's most photogenic boulders, the Buttermilks, and when I visited (from Canada) I was surprised to find that the boulders are on LA municipal property and the pipe that takes Owen's River's water over the Sierras is nearby.
Tech fabrics were a prerequisite to the widespread use of down in adventure clothing. Earlier fabrics were either too heavy, like leather, and would collapse the down and negate its insulating properties, or would get wet like cotton/linen and saturate the down.
Our big brains are a recent mutation and haven't been fully field tested. They seem like more of a liability than anything, they've created more existential risks for us than they've put to rest.
Indeed. Two years after the assassination I wrote a paper on it for a summer school history class. I researched in the local public library, where I read a bunch of magazine articles and Mark Lane books, blissfully unaware of ideological agendas and bad faith, and believed there was a conspiracy--though I didn't know which theory was correct because there were so many and they only increased in the ensuing years. At one point I had a shelf of JFK conspiracy books and then I met the author of one, an ex-boyfriend of friend ... he was very sincere about his incredibly looneytunes claims (https://www.amazon.com/Best-Evidence-Disguise-Deception-Assa...)
It wasn't until usenet came along and I encountered debates between physicists and conspiracy cranks that I started to question it--the physicists would calmly present solid-seeming arguments and the cranks would accuse them of working for the CIA and post malarkey. But I still wasn't sure--a bad argument for something isn't a good argument against it. My biggest breakthrough was when I was dating a law professor whom I greatly respected, very liberal (as am I)--she was the cofounder of the Women's Studies program at UCLA--and she was bemused by my entertaining the conspiracy theories as at all likely (no one in her academic, legal, and feminist circles did), and she casually mentioned that one of the first things she learned in law school was that people are highly unreliable in judging the direction that a sound comes from, so people talking about shots coming from the grassy knoll didn't really mean anything. Her attitude drove me to dig deeper, and when the web came along I found https://www.jfk-assassination.net/ (it was located elsewhere back then). I started seeing all the counterarguments to the misrepresentations in those books and articles I had read, and this was before Bugliosi's 1600 page https://www.amazon.com/Reclaiming-History-Assassination-Pres...
I now know about as well as one can know any historical event that LHO, a man who had defected to the USSR, possibly planning on giving them information about the U-2 (for which he was denounced by U-2 pilot Gary Powers) and had been on TV representing the "Fair Play For Cuba Committee" (of which he was the only member), was the lone gunman. That doesn't mean that his story was simple--it wasn't, and that's part of the fuel for appallingly ignorant and intellectually dishonest conspiracy theories.
It's sad to see on HN claims that no one believes what is believed to be actually true by rational informed people, along with questions like
> What do you believe? The news?
(I haven't had a TV for at least 20 years; what does he believe, YouTube? I know how to gather and weigh information; he doesn't) grossly dishonest assertions that
> pizza gate was corroborated by the epstein emails
and nonsensical ignorant claims about UFOs that are supported by terrible reporting by ignorant sensationalist journalists. It is almost certain that there is intelligent life elsewhere in this vast universe, but there is no evidence that any of them are the cause of our UAPs and many reasons from logic and physics why they aren't and could not be.
> It is almost certain that there is intelligent life elsewhere in this vast universe, but there is no evidence that any of them are the cause of our UAPs and many reasons from logic and physics why they aren't and could not be.
I'm fascinated by such absurd and intellectually dishonest comments. Of course there are people saying that ... just because it's not what you're saying doesn't mean there aren't. I've followed the UFO sightings arena on and off since the 1950s when my brother got heavily into tracking sightings, maintaining a file cabinet of them and subscribing to numerous journals ... there's a much broader range of beliefs and activity than you're acknowledging, and that's what I was talking about in my comment, if you would bother to actually read and understand it.
I'm not going to address your other claims, or comment further on this.
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