The problem is that influencers have shilled stupid VPN services so much that even legislatures think they know what they are and think the primary use for the technology is circumvention and privacy.
They have no idea about all the IPsec tunnels providing site-to-site VPNs for all their businesses. Or how VPN protocols like GRE, which while providing no security on their own, are still very useful for tunneling protocols through different network stacks.
If I exercise today, what will I accomplish? Will I be different tomorrow? Of course the answer is that I won’t accomplish much, and I probably won’t be noticebly different tomorrow; nobody increases their bench press 25lb after a single workout.
The point is not the results of a single workout, because what is significant is not the effect of a single workout or protest or any other long-term effort you want to examine, it is the cumulative effect of continued work toward a common goal.
The Powell Memoradum was written in 1971. The Heritage foundation began developing project 2025 in early 2022. These are efforts that have been in development for decades and years, respectively with many people working very patiently to see them implemented.
Of course a single protest isn’t going to do anything to undo decades of well-orchestrated political and economic changes. If people want to see this changed they can’t stop with a single protest. Just like making a new years resolution to go to the gym once isn’t going to undo years of neglect to change someone’s physical fitness, going to a protest once isn’t going to undo the years of damage to the U.S. Government.
Yes, because it is never comes at their own expense through self-sacrifice. True leaders eat last, not first.
The difference is that for the people dying under capitalism, the system is working as intended, and for the people dying under communism, it is not. In both cases, the leaders don’t really care, because it works for them.
That seems like an easy thing until you consider:
Federalized National guard troops are under Title 10 Authority.
Under Title 10 USC 890 Article 90: Willfully disobeying a lawful order in wartime is punishable with the death penalty.
With the executive branch claiming wartime powers and the DoJ willing to pursue any claim they want, they could certainly choose to pursue the maximum punishment to make an example out of someone.
The ranks of the JAG and military judges hasn’t been purged yet, so I believe it is very inlikely that a court-marshal would reach this punishment, but these orders aren’t something a Soldier can just walk away from without serious legal and financial repurcussions.
What they do in Chicago matters far more than their presence there. Every Soldier needs to recognize their ultimate purpose is to defend the freedom and liberty of their nation’s citizens. They must have a line in the sand that they will refuse to cross and are willing to die for, but simply deploying to a city to stand outside a federal building is not that line.
If it is well known that it is illegal for law enforcement officers to wear masks, and there is an armed man wearing a mask who is threatening a group of people, it would be reasonable to assume they are not a law enforcement officer and a shooting could be justified in self-defense.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.
Also Matthew 6:14-16: “14 For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. 15 But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.” (NIV)
I know it isn’t Biblically supported, but I always thought it would be incredibly poetic if we were asked to pass final judgement on people who had harmed us, only to find out afterwards that we were actually passing judgement on ourselves for our own actions. Makes me wonder how many people would condemn others for their own actions?
This would be a very literally implementation of Matthew 12:36-37: " 36 But I tell you that everyone will have to give account on the day of judgment for every empty word they have spoken. 37 For by your words you will be acquitted, and by your words you will be condemned.” (NIV)
Death from unnatural causes aside, there are so many potentially fatal complications involved with an organ transplant, and even if you dodge all those bullets, there is the simple fact that we degenerate at a cellular level. None of us are on this Earth for long: rich, poor, president or janitor, death will not discriminate.
The RegEx thing is so true in my experience. I started working on a Neovim plugin to make editing injected code easier, and instead of suggesting Treesitter integration it wanted to create its own parser using RegEx…
If you like this book, you should also check out: “The cat in Redhat” and “ripgrep and PAM”.
We should keep in mind that thousands of people work at large corporations like Microsoft and many of them do not agree with company policy and positions, including people in senior roles.
Scott Hanselman is a VP at Microsoft who has given some of the best presentations on AI from a social, ethical, and technical demonstration standpoint that I have seen. I have been spreading his NDC London talk around to everyone I can: https://youtu.be/kYUicaho5k8
It is worth the watch.
The early Church is recorded as living that way:
"44 And all that believed were together, and had all things common; 45 And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need. 46 ¶And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart, " ( Acts 2:44-46 KJV).
However, tearing a political philosophy away from its associated worldview leads to trouble.
This is one of the things I find strange about the political parties in the U.S. the Republican party, which seems to claim the majority of members who claim to be Christians, largely espouse a capitalist economic system. Capitalism is much more congruent with a Darwinist world view than a Christian one.
Meanwhile, the Democrat party, at least the more progressive wing, espouse more of a socialist system but seemingly oppose Christianity and claim a world view more congruent with a capitalist system.
A rational argument is an argument that follows some sort of logical thought process, it has nothing to do with whether the conclusion is correct or not.
This is a rational argument:
Premise 2 is false, and premise 3 is unknown, so the conclusion is false, but it follows a logical thought process and isn’t nonsense.
This is nonsense and irrational:
There is no discernible logic or rational thought process. It is just apparently random statements with no connection.
Again, since we can’t even agree on commonly accepted definitions for basic concepts, we just aren’t going to be able to have any kind of productive conversation.
Good day.
I think it’s rather chauvanistic to try to say it’s better to live imprisoned in a developed country than non-imprisoned in a developing country
That’s not what I said. I said it is better to live imprisoned in the U.S. than to starve to death.
Nah, I don’t retract my statement
Ok, well if you aren’t even going to concede that a rational argument, as incorrect as it might be, isn’t nonsense, then I don’t think we will be able to have any meaningful discourse.
I wish you well. Good luck with your Marxist endeavors.
Had the original post simply pointed out that America’s incarceration rate is horrible, I would have no disagreement with it, but instead it chose to make a direct comparison between present-day America and China during the Cultural Revolution.
My primary disagreement with this comparison is not with that fact that present-day America has a higher reported incarceration rate than China during the Cultural Revolution, it is the fact that to an audience that may not study history, it helps craft the narrative that China during the 1960s was a much nicer place to live than present-day America because the incarceration rate was significantly lower. I thought it was worth mentioning that, regardless of why it happened, or if anyone was at fault, one of the largest famines in human history occurred in China immediately preceding this time period, which made it not a very nice place to live. There are things worse than incarceration, and most people, myself included, would choose life in a U.S. prison over starvation. Not that either choice is a good once.
My secondary disagreement was with the implication that I don’t know how basic statistics work. I suggested that a massive removal of poor-people from a population could have reduced the overall incarceration rate. You said that this was “nonsense”. Not that there is insufficient data, or that it wouldn’t be a very significant change. My burden of proof is not, probable, or possible, it is just above the level of nonsense. Or do you retract your previous statement that I made a nonsensical argument?
I never said it would make it equal. In fact, I’m confident that it would not.
The whole reason we started this argument is because you made a condescending comment implying either that I can’t read, or that I don’t understand what rate per-100,000 means. I understand what per-100,000 means, but I also understand that not all groups of 100,000 people are the same; removing a large sub-population of people that doesn’t exactly match the overall population’s average will result in a change to the overall population average.
If you have a total population (T), and you are measuring the rate of an event (E), then E / T gives your average event rate for the total population, which you can then normalize to a per-X number. For example: T = 1000 people E = 10 incarcerations. 10 / 1000 = .01, normalized to per 100 capita would be 1 per 100 people on average, from the total population.
If you have a sub-demographic in that population (Ts), and it has a different rate of an event (Es) then its rate is also Es / Ts. For example: Ts = 100 poor-people Es = 5 incarcerations. 5 / 100 = .05, normalized to a per 100 capita would be 5 people per 100 on average, for that sub-population.
If you suddenly remove that sub-population, what happens to the rate of the overall population? That’s easy to calculate: (E - Es) / (T - Ts) (10 - 5) / (1000 - 100) = 5 / 900 = .0055, normalized to a per 100 capita would be .55.
Suggesting that a sub-demographic doesn’t perfectly match the per-capita average of an entire population and that removing them would change the overall per-capita rate isn’t nonsense.
the idea that the CPC didn’t incarcerate as many people per capita is because of the famine. This is nonsense.
How is that nonsense? What was the per-capita incarceration rate of the population who died in the famine? What was the per-capita incarceration rate of the population that didn’t die in the famine?
There is probably no data for that, so we can’t know for sure, but I showed that in the U.S. a large famine would result in a lower incarceration rate because poor people would starve at a disproportionate rate, and poor people are also incarerated at a disproportnate rate, so that would reduce the overall rate per capita. This doesn’t necessarily apply to the situation in China, but I don’t think it is nonsense with no foundation in logic.
It’s the system that determines how its run, not the people at the top.
That is the catch. It only determines how it is run if the people at the top are following the system. The system is supposed to determine that, but if everyone in positions of power decide to disregard what the system is supposed to be, then suddenly the system that a government used to have or advertises as having, no longer represents the actual state of affairs.
Responsibility means owning an outcome. If I take responsibility for the safety of your children and a meteorite literally falls out of the sky and kills them, I am still responsible. I’m not going to try to make excuses and make sure you know it wasn’t my fault and there wasn’t anything I could have done. I was responsible. Your kids are dead. The buck stops with me. That’s what actual leaders do, they own the outcome.
To be perfectly clear, I don’t subscribe to the notion that communism is bad and capitalism is good. I think every socio-economic system has pros and cons and are prone different forms of degredation and usurption.
I think the people leading a country and the people that comprise its society have a larger impact on life than their system of government.
With that said, a government is ultimately responsible for the safety and well-being of its people.
I’m curious what your definition of religion is?