It pressures the system in those cities or states, which is actual pressure to the system, just not direct pressure on the federal government. History shows you can mount pressure through local and state changes until it gets overwhelming support on a federal level.

You can make the argument there might be more effective or quicker solutions, but this is unquestionably one path toward it.

Then Putin should be very scared of that risk and withdraw immediately!

He should, but he doesn’t appear to be. That puts the ball in everybody else’s court, unfair though it is.

Or the Russian people should be scared of that and force him to withdraw.

Who am I kidding, the Russian people can’t stand up to President Putin, they’re too busy listening to General Stolichnaya.

A large number of Russians are trying to protest. They typically get killed or imprisoned. It’s hard to fault the remainder for not risking their lives for a probably fruitless attempt at dissent.

He will run out of people, at the expense of both Russian human beings and Ukrainian human beings. That’s the best case scenario with continued war, assuming it doesn’t escalate to directly include other countries.

That’s not mutually exclusive with what I said.

This has the possible side effect of nuclear war.

Pretty much everybody’s the bad guy here, tbh. Sort of a Lybia-during-Gaddafi situation - he was horrible, but it’s not like they’ve been in a great place since.

Agreed, but that’s not happening. It’s wild that the only possible options anybody sees right now are all-out war or Putin suddenly having a change of heart, and anybody who considers there might be other avenues to pursue is ridiculous.

Fine, the war goes on, and we’ll see hundreds of thousands of people continue to die. Nothing else anybody in the entire world can do, it all rests on Putin changing his mind, and we’ll just have to wait it out. Sucks to suck for all of those people, their families, and their descendants who are going to grow up in a country that’s going to take generations to rebuild.

How Parking Garages Became a Playground for Criminals, Extremists and Terrorists

How Public Parks Became a Playground for Criminals, Extremists and Terrorists

How the Street Became a Playground for Criminals, Extremists and Terrorists

How Literal Playgrounds Became a Playground for Criminals, Extremists and Terrorists

Maybe if these things are happening everywhere, it’s not the app that’s the issue. This kind of talk opens us up to bans on Signal and similar apps, and that’s just unacceptable. Address the core issues in society, don’t try (and typically fail) to bandage it by taking away more and more of people’s rights and freedoms.

They said the same thing when he was repeatedly lining up troops along Ukraine’s border.

It’s not a problem until it is. They need to be making more progress on peace talks. It’s unacceptable this war has gone on for this long and killed this many people.

IANAL, but my understanding is entrapment is when they convince you to do something you might not otherwise have done. So if the cops create an account of a minor and message an adult asking if they want to fuck, and the answer is like “uh no, absolutely not,” and then the cops follow up by repeatedly sexting, and the adult blocks their account, but the cops relentlessly keep sexting from burner accounts, and plant people in the adult’s work and social environments who keep talking about how normal it is to fuck minors who sext you out of the blue, and then the adult is finally like “oh whatever, fine” - that’s entrapment.

Now, most people still are literally never going to take the minor up on the offer, no matter how relentless they are or how normalized it is in their environment. That’s true about most crimes. The question is how many people wouldn’t have committed that crime unless this very specific police-created situation came up, and that difference is what falls into entrapment.

I’d argue this isn’t even close to entrapment, because all they did was set up an account much like all the others that exist, and waited for others to find them. It’s no different from leaving a bike unlocked, then catching somebody who steals it. There are unlocked bikes everywhere, and people don’t suddenly decide to steal the only bike of their life because they happened to find that unlocked bike.

Of course, they could also be spending this time and money getting to the root of societal issues and fixing the core problems instead of catching a small percentage of active pedophiles and letting the rest of them continue to cause irreparable harm.

I don’t think that’s true. Cheney’s just not part of Trump’s in-crowd. Cheney would go full fascist if he were at the top of it.

I don’t think society on a local, national, or world level is past persecution for stupid reasons, and I fall into a number of categories that certain people might go after me for if they got into power. I want to make that difficult for them.

But, perhaps the part I like most is the struggle sessions. The entire community will heavily focus on a current topic, then hash it out with good faith discussion.

I’ve never seen this - not just from that instance, but literally anywhere on the internet, even back in the forum or bb days. But I’ve been looking for something like that for years, and I’d be interested. Do you know of any specific examples of this happening?

He’s unquestionably getting pardoned. I disagree that we should feel good about another rich asshole getting off the hook because some other rich asshole wouldn’t like it.

Assuming by “economy” we mean “wall street’s ledgers,” there could easily be a massive correction/recession/depression coming up, and the president wouldn’t make much of a difference there. What they do to recover from it could differ a lot, as seen with Trump/Biden, Bush/Obama, or any number of older examples.

What is your alternative to sanctions?

The short answer:

The same alternative that’s been the best and most effective alternative throughout literally all of history: diplomacy with a focus on improving the lives of the general populace. Working with the UN as well as groups like Amnesty international, Doctors Without Borders, and Reporters Without Borders to accomplish that end goal.

The longer answer:

We knew the Taliban was going to get back into power after the U.S. influenced those events. We knew somebody like Maduro was going to get into power after the U.S. influenced those events. And we knew somebody like Putin was going to get into power after the U.S. influenced those events. These were either a result of total incompetence (likely, in at least Afghanistan’s case) or intentional (as with something like Allende/Pinochet). It’s not easy for anybody to prove which of these was intentional, but it’s worth noting they’re not always trying their best to help the people of the country they’re intervening in or the people of the U.S., they’re trying their best to accumulate wealth and power.

Historically, problems like this have always popped up because of power and wealth imbalance. You can prevent these problems by ensuring people are living happy, healthy lives. Sometimes, as with South Korea, Japan, Israel, or West Germany, it means propping up their economies and making sure they develop quickly. They become allies awfully quickly that way, even if they were sworn enemies just a few years prior (as with Japan or Germany). But even if you can’t occupy them with military force and control their every move, softening relations tends to lead to better outcomes. North Korea was actually being somewhat cooperative with Clinton until W threw a shitfit. Iran’s compliance with safety inspectors has been directly related to how the international community - mainly the U.S. - treats them. Calling these two countries the Axis of Evil along with Iraq and then invading Iraq was a very, very poor way to keep them from developing nuclear weapons.

So no, I don’t believe in just letting them “do whatever they want” because that’s also shown to be a terrible mistake time after time. Letting Hitler do whatever he want obviously was a mistake, but letting Hitler get into power in the first place by imposing a crushingly bad economy on the Germans was what created the opportunity to make that mistake in the first place. The U.S., as the most powerful economic and militaristic country in the world for decades, and as one that has consistently intervened to cause these issues in a very direct way, can fix these issues if they want to. Hell, they could prevent some of them just by not doing shit like this in the first place.

The real answer:

The U.S. has over 13,000 people in the U.S. Foreign Service. It’s their job to figure out the intricacies of diplomacy, not ours. People are dying and they’re failing to solve that problem.

And lastly, I’m pretty sure you’ve decided I’m on the wrong side so you won’t read any of this and you certainly won’t look at it as a nuanced, good faith approach, but it was a good exercise for me anyway.

It’s not about feeling bad for Maduro or the Russians, it’s about wanting the U.S. to be more productive instead of whatever this is. Snatching up Russian yachts hasn’t done shit to stop hundreds of thousands of people being killed or wounded in Ukraine. Taking Maduro’s plane isn’t going to give freedom of press and election oversight to the Venezuelans.

It’s just grandstanding and trying to make people feel like the “right side is winning” when actually, everybody’s going to keep on losing because the power majority isn’t actually fixing anything.

Okay, am I the only one who just sees this article as “U.S. government steals a plane, pats themselves on the back”?

Today, the U.S. Department of Justice took action to enforce U.S. sanctions – seizing an aircraft used by Maduro and his representatives.

He wasn’t on it. There’s no report of them finding anything useful on the plane. Are we supposed to assume he has no other planes? That this will have any significant impact on him whatsoever?

Whatever your moral stance is on Maduro, or stealing, or U.S. intervention, this feels absurd. Even if the dude were literally Hitler, this just doesn’t accomplish anything. The time spent inspecting and stealing this plane could’ve been better spent on so many other things.

As the conservatives would say, my taxes paid for this and I want them back.

Wet-bulb weather is when, because of a combination of humidity and heat, you can’t naturally cool off with things like sweat.

This isn’t quite right, even though the gist of it ends up being right. This is one of very few things I’m legitimately an expert in, so I don’t want to let it go uncorrected not because it makes a big difference, but because it just feels weird not to and maybe somebody will be interested.

Dry bulb temperature is what you typically read when you’re looking at a thermometer. The bulb, the thing that’s checking the temperature, is literally dry. To get a wet bulb reading, you essentially put a wet sock around a thermometer (to get a “psychrometer”) and swing it around for a while, because you get a different reading when the water is evaporating off it. So when the air is fully saturated (100% humidity, standing in a cloud), your wet bulb and dry bulb readings will be the same. In all other cases, your wet bulb temperature will be lower.

“Wet bulb weather” isn’t really a phrase people use. High wet bulb, high relative humidity, high absolute humidity - all the same thing (and in fact, if you have just one of those and the dry bulb temperature, you can calculate the others). They just measure how wet the air is in slightly different ways.

Yeah, his alternative energy push was definitely positive, he just didn’t have the political capital or savvy to make anything of it. He admittedly walked into a pretty raw deal with stagflation and an energy crisis, but he handled them so poorly it’s hard to justify cutting him any slack. Telling the public energy is in short supply so they’re going to have to make sacrifices is a losing strategy no matter what you’re advocating for.