slg

Once again, a person who wasn't killed is your evidence that "a bunch of people" were killed. You genuinely don't recognize how silly that is? John Hinckley almost killed Reagan, "so we can be fairly sure" he killed a "bunch" of other presidents.

I'm afraid I'm still not following you. In what previous generation did conservatives support hate speech laws? Because the topic being discussed was how a position can gradually over time change from liberal to conservative or vice versa. And from my perspective, it seems like you're just jumping at an opportunity you saw to complain about some fringe leftist position that you don't like.

I guess "we better rethink how the whole criminal justice system works." The guy living in exile seems like a silly place to start that conversation rather than the millions of Americans currently in prison for agreeing to plea deals.

>we know that that a person released from the Polish black site were almost killed, so we can be fairly sure that a bunch of people died there

This is the kind of statement that just completely undermines any possible conversation we could have about the law. Can you seriously not take a step back and realize the jump in logic you made here from one person was almost killed and that being evidence of "a bunch of people" being killed? Because this discussion is not worth having with someone who genuinely believes this jump in logic is reasonable.

>we also don't have to flatten these historical events (snowden maybe making some mistakes vs the US government's spying) so we can pretend that they're of equal valence, scale and severity

In what way do you think this was done? Nothing I said here was condoning the government's behavior.

First, the conversation was about the DNC, so what centrist Dems think is more important than "Progressives, radlibs, and the ultra-left". But beyond that, what specific policies are you talking about? Because without naming specific parts of the DNC platform, what you're saying sounds completely indistinguishable from "my niece corrected my pronoun usage and that made me angry".

>A complete liberal from not that long ago would now be deemed a conservative by the DNC.

You say this like it isn't inherent to the nature of liberalism versus conservatism. A liberal of a prior generation is almost always conservative compared to liberals of the current generation. It just feels different this time because you're actually witnessing it change in real time rather than learning about it from history.

Once again, there was no flex. We aren't judging the morality or ethics of the situation in any direction. We are simply looking back on historical events with hindsight.

We also don't have to flatten these historical events into one good side and one bad side. Reality tends to be more complicated than that. It's ok to recognize that Snowden maybe made some mistakes. That is neither an endorsement of the US government's spying or an accusation of ill intent against Snowden.

Your objection isn't to just Assange's case. It's with over 90% of criminal cases in the US. I was talking about a particular situation, so I'm not going to have the debate you seemingly want to have.

No one was holding them up "as a shining example of how the USA treats whistleblowers and journalists." I was holding them up as history. History will judge Snowden differently because he chose exile and didn't give himself the opportunity for pardons or plea deals like Manning and Assange.

>Assange didn't commit a crime

Assange literally pleaded guilty to violating the Espionage Act.

And if we're going to pretend that plea deals are coercion than we better rethink how the whole criminal justice system works.

Manning and Assange are both free today. Isn't that proof that whether it was reasonable to believe Snowden was correct at the time, history has proved him wrong?

Sure, the engines may have died, but not only is the plane still airborne, it's even accelerating!

>Presidents and their appointees come and go. The people pushing the regulators[1] are not subject to US election cycles.

While true, it’s also true that presidents and their appointees can vary wildly in their susceptibility to those “people pushing”. Both sides might be bad, but one’s very obviously worse.

>"It" is having some level of military capability. I agree with Ajedi32 that not doing it is strict pacifism.

>beloch and jump- advocated for some level of national defense as a practical necessity

I don't think this an accurate summary of the nuance contained in beloch's comment. I'll specifically highlight what I think was lost by the people who replied:

> People working for companies that do defence work have a moral obligation to observe how their labour is used and refuse to give it if the results are unethical. It's no different from soldiers having a moral duty to refuse illegal orders.

>To answer your question, I'd say that participating in the defence industry can be justifiable if you remain guided by ethics, and unjustifiable if you abandon them for money.

Once the choice is either a yes or no, this nuance is lost. If you set up the choice as between pacifism and military capability, you're tacitly endorsing any form of military capability including nuclear weapons.

You and other people who replied removed nuance from beloch's comment. The "moral grey zones" were not merely a question of working for a military contractor or not. Just from a basic grammar perspective, the use of the plural "zones" should indicate this isn't a singular question. I read that as a reference to the moral and ethical issues described in the three previous paragraphs.

Yet by the time you replied, those three paragraphs of nuance were flattened. It was no longer a question of which military programs and actions can be morally and ethical justified, it is now simply a question of whether they are done or not. And once it is flattened into a binary yes or no, all that nuance of potentially unjustifiable uses of the military in beloch's comment fall into the "yes" category. Making it into a binary reduces the issue to pacifism versus total war.

Do you think Ukraine would have used nuclear weapons against Russia? How do you think Russia would have responded to that? Do you think that would cost fewer than a hundred thousand Ukrainian lives?

Once again, nuclear weapons can only be a deterrent if your enemy believe you will use them and everyone knows that no nation state has the stomach to use them. Russia doesn't have to fear MAD and yet it is still deterred from using nuclear weapons. What makes you think that Ukraine would choose MAD over their current predicament? Because if Russia doesn't believe Ukraine is willing to commit to MAD, Russia can still invade. It certainly changes strategy, but over the years many nuclear powers have been involved in arm conflicts without using nuclear weapons, including in conflicts against other nuclear powers.

Here is what I responded to:

> It's more like "if I don't do it then I better hope somebody else will, otherwise my whole country will inevitably become subservient to a despotic regime". Basically, the question is whether strict pacifism is a tenable national policy in the real world.

This person equates not "do[ing] it" with "strict pacifism".

This is from the comment you replied to:

>As for "someone else will do it if i don't".... (aka your argument). That's true of a lot of things, and I sleep great at night choosing not to steal from people even though I know others will choose to steal. It turns out I don't have the ability to choose their actions for them, only my own.

This is from your response:

>It's more like "if I don't do it then I better hope somebody else will, otherwise my whole country will inevitably become subservient to a despotic regime".

Are you now claiming that all those "I"s are really "companies"? You think you were having a conversation about how "[companies] sleep great at night"?

>How is that an argument that demilitarized pacifism is a tenable national policy.

I never made that argument. My original comment was refuting the idea that taking a singular option off the table is equivalent to pacifism. Ukraine didn't feel the need to develop a nuclear program, that doesn't make them pacifists.

I'll be as straightforward as possible. Ukraine does not have a nuclear deterrent and yet Russia is deterred from using nuclear weapons ergo Ukraine didn't need its own nuclear weapons as a deterrent to prevent Russia from using nuclear weapons. And when even the "despotic regimes" like Russia are refusing to use a weapon, it no longer becomes a credible threat for the ostensibly good guys to threaten to use.

Weapons can only act as a deterrent if your opponent believes you're willing to use them and there are some weapons that no one is willing to use. And if no one is willing to use them, it's probably a waste to develop them in the first place.

>Because the normalisation of nuclear weapons has global consequences in a way conventional warfare does not.

And you don't think that has any chance of applying to some hypothetical yet to be developed future military tech?

The person I replied to stated that a country refusing to develop military tech for moral reasons was destined to fall to a country that ignores morals and develops that tech. I pointed to an example of an aggressor nation that is refusing to use all the military tech at its disposal. Modern society has decided that ethics don't go completely out the window in war and by and large nation states at least pretend they agree.

All AI generated art feels somewhat masturbatory to me, but AI generated music is the most baffling of them all. It's like what if someone thought Muzak had too much soul.

>Nuking Kyiv and Lviv would probably force Ukraine to surrender.

Or if we want to take nuclear options off the table because Russia values infrastructure, they aren't attacking population centers with bioweapons.

>This is the real constraint. There is still the credible threat of being economically isolated by America, Europe, China and India. (Neither China nor India wants the normalisation of nuclear bombardment normalised. They both have border disputes with nuclear-armed neighbours.)

Ethics enforced by external pressure are still ethics in action. The comment I replied to was basically arguing that we have to do this unethical thing because if we don't our enemies will. Well here is an example of our ostensibly unethical enemy not doing something because of ethical pressure. So why would this pressure work for nuclear weapons and not this new military tech?

>Nobody reasonable would. Russia started a war of choice. That's the opposite of pacifism.

Yes, that was my point. The person I replied to stated a nation taking actions off the table "will inevitably become subservient to a despotic regime". As a response, I pointed to a country that many would call "a despotic regime" who seems to operate with at least some consideration towards the ethics of war even if that is due to external pressure.

Would you define Russia not nuking Ukraine as "strict pacifism"? Because every modern country and army seems to have some basic standard of ethics and morals that restrict them from waging total war even if you want to argue that's purely for diplomatic or PR reasons.

There are a whole lot of decisions that need to be made to get from "strict pacifism" to total war, so I don't know why we need to flatten this into a binary.

>They will have post histories hidden

Reddit has strangely trained me to be skeptical of this form a privacy protection in a way that I'm not on any other platforms. If someone on Reddit has one of those default two words and a number usernames and then hides their history, I'll block them for the slightest reason. If someone has an intentionally chosen username and doesn't hide their history, it's much easier to tell they aren't a bot or troll account which automatically gives them a significant benefit of the doubt in my mind.

Great, I'm sure getting more data for a complete picture of the area is a huge undertaking, but simply switching to the light map that shows the geography more clearly is a big improvement.

>The massive downzoning of the 1980s...

To put numbers to this for those who aren't aware, LA was zoned for roughly 10 million people in the 1960s and by the 1980s it was zoned for roughly 4 million. It's part of the reason the city has had population growth slow to a crawl. It was decided some 40 plus years ago that LA should stay under 4 million people, so it has even til today. But the number of people who want to live in LA is constantly growing, so housing prices continue to rise and as a result lower income people are slowly but surely being pushed out of their homes and out of the city entirely.