Xhieron @ xhieron @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

This is just realpolitik. A second Trump presidency is an existential threat to the Republic. Under those terms, it's hard not to justify any action, no matter how repugnant, that prevents it or even reduces the likelihood. That full-throated support of Israel happens to put Biden in the same camp as end-times death cultists is incidental: it polls better than the alternative.

To be even more cynical, there's a compelling, if grizzly, argument that American-friendly Israel is a perpetual anchorhead for American geopolitical interests in the Levant, and genocide doesn't really change that. It's easy (and appropriate) to condemn all actors here: Hamas, Netanyahu/IDF, and the US/Biden are all evil. Sane people everywhere would prefer that all parties put down their rockets and go the fuck home.

But if that's not going to happen, would Biden be serving his country better by wagging his finger at Netanyahu?

I wasn't arguing at all, nor agreeing or disagreeing with anyone. Just talking through the reasoning, since you asked for the story to justify it. [Again, not the person you originally responded to.]

Not the person to whom you replied, but there are many stories behind that paragraph. The problem is that a dog bred to be strong is likely to be strong enough to ignore a leash when it wants to. A few minutes on your search engine of choice can give you headlines of pits and other powerful breeds getting away from their handlers even when leashed.

The resulting advocacy is that criminal culpability should still lie even in the absence of negligence on the part of the owner. In many states, tort liability will lie on a strict liability basis (i.e., the owner is liable for damages incurred by the victim of an animal attack even if the animal exhibited no prior dangerous behavior)--in other states, the owner must be aware of the danger of the animal, for instance from prior bites, before liability will attach. That's generally not true in criminal cases, however, where theories usually require a finding of negligence due to the higher burden of proof and the higher stakes (i.e., incarceration).

The best analogy I can think of would be statutory rape--you can be guilty and incarcerated even if you consented, the victim consented, and you genuinely had no idea that the victim was below the statutory age. The position would be that we should adopt the same for animal attacks: You can (and should, advocates would argue) be incarcerated even if your animal injured someone through no fault of your own and you had no previous reason to believe the animal would become dangerous.

Reading about some of the attacks in which the owner exercised their best efforts to control the animal and failed, I can see the argument: Merely owning the animal at all is accepting responsibility for its actions, full stop. Personally, I think current negligence theory is basically sufficient for this (i.e., if the dog can get away from you, you have a duty to know that and prevent it), but the benefit of this kind of strict liability legislation would be that all the bickering in these threads about which breed is good, which breed is bad, and who knows and doesn't know dogs would evaporate. Put your money where your mouth is. The dog you can count on never to kill someone is the dog that can't.

Love, the owner of a small yappy type dog who is harmless because he's tiny and trivially easy to overpower.

Very optimistic of you.

Joking aside, apathy isn't the problem. That is, the issue isn't that people don't care. Ordinary people care a great deal. The problem is that the cost of the action that would be sufficient to change things is too high personally for those ordinary people to take.

People just don't want to be gunned down by riot police or go to prison for assassinating oil executives. The solution to this problem isn't paper straws and recycling (and it never has been). Further, abandoning cars isn't feasible for stroad-bound Americans. Abandoning beef is, but your family switching to chicken and fish won't even twitch the needle.

Point is, the kind of change that's needed is societal--the kind of revolutionary change that's paid for in streets full of blood. In the "Well if enough people just ..." argument, the enough people is hundreds of millions. We have to become a fossil fuel eschewing society. Whole industries have to collapse.

The companies responsible for climate change can be counted on one person's fingers and toes, and they're names any adult can guess in a few tries.

We're not storming their doors because we don't want to be recipients of the state violence these companies will muster to stop us.

Flooding cities might change our minds, but probably only for the people who actually live there. The sad truth is the rest of us will sooner consign Miami to the depths than orphan our children for their grandchildren's sakes.

Things will change when we starve, but probably not a moment sooner.

Very happy to see this here. This piece should be mandatory reading in every Health class in America. Attribution bias is absolutely at the core of the debate.

I know we're all cynics here, but good for him. Even if this is entirely a publicity stunt, the guy is still taking a huge risk that someone might offer to take him up on it. That's a lot of nerve, and that's a lot of faith, either in God or in the way Hamas values hostages.

Either way, to repeat the notion elsewhere in the thread: any of us offering? Maybe it's a low risk--but it ain't zero. It's easy to dismiss these kinds of gestures from the same armchairs from which we solve geopolitics and warfare, but a public figure going on record for selflessness is something to be celebrated, even if the only noble trait is willingness to roll the dice on human nature in the hope of sharing an altruistic sentiment.

"Hurt me instead of her" is something we wish more people of faith would say everywhere.

Is that realistic? Not a rhetorical question: I'm genuinely curious. I ask because the last time I tried to update a single (desktop) part, it was more cost-effective to replace the whole Pc and migrate the salvageable parts since the only thing I could have held onto would have been the ram, SSD, and PSU.

I suppose with a laptop you have the monitor to also consider, and admittedly I know nothing about laptop boards, but it just seems like 6 years is replacement time anyway, at least for a daily use computer.

Consequences are great, but above all, be a fan of the player characters. They are the heroes and the avatars of your friends. The last thing you want to do is deliver a negative consequence that players interpret as punishment and that relies on your interpretation of past events (which could well differ from that of the players).

If they leave threads unpulled, things should change in their absence--but the changes shouldn't penalize them for making a rational choice based on limited information. The world should feel alive, but the opportunity cost of their choices shouldn't be catastrophe. After all, you let them steer. It's one thing to summon Tiamat if the GM says, "They'll summon Tiamat next Tuesday if you don't stop them," but Tiamat doesn't show up if they got distracted before learning about the ritual.

Service guarantees citizenship!

Military parade in my capital. Compel my legislature to grant me lifetime tenure as First Citizen. Annex the country. No exit strategy.

Peace in our time.

I can't believe I'd never read that before despite being a fan of Doctorow in general. Thank you. Exceptional work. Should be mandatory reading.

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. - JFK

That sucks. I hope and pray you have the best possible outcome. Fuck cancer.

It's not abstract at all, but my favorite is the Living God. It's an old one (Elohim khayyim), but I strongly empathize with the sentiment: if there is a God, God must be alive. She must be able to do things--God must have volition. He isn't just a product of natural order (e.g., the Sun). He might be a prick sometimes, but His actions are better than chance. If your god is a coin toss, your god may as well be a coin toss. Whichever God demonstrates Her existence is the real One. Everything else is make-believe at best, a long con at worst.

Uh, yeah. Everybody knows that. Women can't participate in the workforce? Childhood poverty funnels kids into the military and prisons while ensuring gun violence remains a national boogeyman? That's kind of the point. These regressive outcomes are exactly what the American political right wants.

Smart lawyers are here to get ahead. I'll take whatever case the client is willing to bankroll, and losers are priced accordingly. I've taken on some horrifying clunkers because the client was willing to roll the dice on single digit odds and I had bills to pay, and that's true for most people in the profession. The lawyer still wins if he can say "the client lost, but he would have lost a lot worse without me." The lawyer who "never loses" is a Hollywood fiction that only exists in the real world in prosecution quotas (where it's a measure of prosecutorial discretion) and very narrow areas like patent.

In any event, if you're working for Donald Trump, you're not in it for the actual representation. You're betting on the story. Win or lose, you're networking with archdemons from now on. As long as you don't commit any felonies yourself, representing Trump ought to be good for your career. It's not a guarantee, but if somebody asked me right now if I'd take on Trump for any of his cases, knowing I'm not getting paid by Trump? I'd absolutely do it. Trump isn't the customer--he's the product. The customer is--in this case--Fox. It's like going to an Ivy League school. The point isn't to get the degree; it's to meet the people who control the rungs on the mobility ladder. Habba might have fucked up royally by not demanding a jury, but she's absolutely not stupid for representing Trump.

Somebody feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but reading between the lines here, it looks like the Ohio Supreme Court is majority Republican, and the risk of maintaining the litigation would be that the Court install a map that's even worse since the swing vote retired (at least according to the linked AP article). If this view is correct, it means this isn't giving in so much as conceding that the status quo is as good as it gets.

"We know now it is the arrangement"

Can you explain what you mean here?

This. The office, the restaurants, the gym, the local stores? They're all owned by the same capitalists, and they want you spending your paycheck there. This is about converting the limited hours of your life into wealth for the rent-seeking bourgeousie: it's still the same company store. It just has a different name.

No war but the class war.

This is very upsetting to me--more as a point of principle than in fact--but I appreciate that it doesn't bother younger generations at all. I just had a small argument with my 11 year old about how not-a-big-deal-who-cares this is, and it basically ended with us agreeing to disagree since it'll be his problem and his kids' problem.

And the problem is normalizing the notion that an OS doesn't need to include a non-subscription word processor. The entire point of this move is to shift the OS Overton Window in favor of consumers accepting and expecting that features like word processors, spreadsheets, etc., should be installed separately and paid for on a subscription basis despite previous iterations of the same software being feature complete on install and purchased at a set, non-recurring fee.

WordPad hasn't been anybody's first choice for a word processor in years, but it was included with Windows and did the bare minimum for unsophisticated users. Now we're entering an era in which those users will as a matter of course buy off-the-shelf computers that come pre-installed without WordPad, but rather with a trial of Office Fuck-You-Pay-Me Edition. Those users may well discover that after their first six months with their new computer (that has made Microsoft more money selling their data than they paid for it), they suddenly get a pop-up informing them that their trial is up and MS wants $99.99 to release the documents they're holding hostage.

It's a step backwards for consumers in general, so even for the sophisticated of us who are least likely to be personally affected by this change, there's definitely cause for alarm.