I frankly can't see how someone can look around at the world in 2026 and come to the conclusion that "military" == "automatically bad." There are bad actors in this world who would be more than happy to kill you and take your stuff because they feel like it, and these days some of them run countries.
Yes, but some of them run countries where we live in (and therefore working for military contractors in this country is literally helping kill people to take their stuff). This includes US where tech is so heavily concentrated.
"Bothsidesism" is a tired argument. Somehow if you don't think that one side of a debate is utter evil and the other side is as pure as the driven snow, you're engaging in "bothsidesism" if you acknowledge there are any shades of gray in the world. Which is a childish argument for anyone older than a high school sophomore.
"Bothsidesism" is a lie that is used to avoid criticizing one side when the other side is also bad. Just because one side is awful does not grant the other side a free pass to be immune from criticism or to get their way on everything. The idea of "bothsidesism" forces a false dichotomy and then forces you to pick a side, when there are almost always more than two choices. It's what partisans use to beat down people who say "I pick 'None Of The Above,' because you both suck."
You define it that way but that's only you as far as I know - I haven't seen that definition or had that experience - and it ignores the actual bothsidesism problem, which is certainly not a lie IME.
> IMO the sort of person who wants a vehicle like Elon's dumpster has a strong overlap with Elon's politics. Basically everything about its design and marketing was aimed at the sort of person who is focused on presenting a masculine image, who thinks they're going to be in a war zone on their daily commute, who wishes they could drive through a crowd of protesters, etc.
Elon is an ass, but this is still the most crudely and childishly stereotyped thing I've read on the internet today. Congrats.
Until someone who hates Elon (not saying that's wrong per se) throws a brick through the window (which IS wrong per se) and you're on the hook for paying for it.
They may not have put it there because they were "self-conscious" about their "statement car." They may have put it there in an honest attempt to avoid having their car vandalized for something they had nothing to do with.
While there's more than enough room to criticize both agencies these days, and if I did work for one of them I'd be retaining personal legal representation, doxxing people is not the answer. Sure, if some bad actors can be sued/prosecuted, that's not a bad thing per se.
But we're already living in a world where US Senators and Supreme Court Justices have had to have security provided because of death threats from both sides of the aisle. We don't need to be encouraging vigilantes. No side is so noble that people can't do evil in its name.
two wrongs don't make it right but just to document that ICE has been using their facial scan and plate scan apps meant to determine immigration status on non-violent protestors and then following them home (or even more creepy, leading them to the protestor's home) and calling them out by full name and details
I'd settle for the middle-ground law enforcement can't wear masks and cover their agency/badge number (or use fake plates)
Extreme powers has to come with extreme responsibility, they are heavily armed and also using their cars to ram people on purpose, they don't have to follow rules because they know no-one knows who they are
"Two wrongs don't make it right" is a pleasant aphorism. Sometimes it takes a wrong to correct a wrong.
By analogy: No amount of polite words will make Russia leave Ukraine. Killing every Russian in Ukraine probably won't do it either. And precise targeting of just the drone sources in Russia isn't feasible.
Blowing to smithereens Russian fuel depots inside their cities? That will negatively impact, probably even kill, innocent Russian citizens. So, definitely a kind of "wrong"... that is necessary to end the war.
"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If... if... We didn’t love freedom enough." --Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago
We learn from history. These people don't get to terrorize our communities without pushback; no amount of finger-wagging will change this. (To be clear, I do not advocate violence, death threats, etc. But their little cosplay masks will not protect their anonymity. Let their friends and neighbors find out who they really are -- maybe they will feel shame for once.)
I read that during the irish occupation, irish policemen (so, working for the british governement) were rejected and isolated socially, treated as traitors to their people.
Which led them to eventually refuse to continue oppressing their people for money, the revolution, independance, all that.
I do agree that local policies are important, but I'm wary of "Nothing happening in the federal governemnt or the middle east or eastern Europe affects me from a local standpoint."
If there's a theme to US politics these days, it's one party or the other trying to get power so they can ram home the same policies across the nation, and the hell with state or local governments that want otherwise.
Since the advent of social media, there's a huge blurring of the lines between national and local issues. The fact that, say, someone got shot 2,000 miles away should be a tragedy, but have no bearing on my own life. But now one party or the other will use it as a cudgel to push policies in my own state and locality.
If something happens in the US or the middle east I'll find out about it - because so many other people need to know the same it isn't hard to find enough people to pay for it.
However if something happens in my city - odds are nobody else reading this lives in the same city and so you don't care. There are only about 30,000 people in the world who care about my cities' parks, the rest of you will never care (maybe one of the thousands of you will happen to stop at a park for one hour of your life - but if we have terrible parks you will just head to the next town). However I live here, the parks in my city matter to me, and so I need someone to tell me about them. Remember I just used parks as an example, the school board and library board happen to meet on the same night so it isn't even possible for me to attend both and that is before we account for my kid's having gymnastics at the same night making getting to one tricky.
My local issue of interest is how my county and state administer elections. I volunteer as a poll worker for nearly every election, with a preference for the "boring" low-turnout contests like state legislative and local board primaries. This experience has given me insight you would never get on national news but lots of people blindly argue about: voter ID requirements, how provisional ballots work, why higher-population counties take longer to report results on election night, what election night "calls" actually mean, entirely mundane failure modes that can slow down the line, etc.
You'd think that for such an important issue like elections you'd get more interest at the local level where regular citizens can actually get involved. But nope. We're always desperate to fill poll worker assigments on non-presidential years, even though those are the best and least stressful opportunities to experience first-hand what it's all about.
Basically everything the feds do winds up getting implemented state or locally in a backhanded national drinking age sort of way.
When you get into the minutia of policy changes and "yeah we'll just enforce what the feds say and let the official rules be wrong until someone sues" type behavior that comes about as a result it'll have you shopping for bulldozers on FBMP.
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