Hard disagree. Randomly murdering fascists does not a revolution make, to say nothing of the odds of winning that fight.

Go to the gym. Be able to do cardio without dying. Work on your fitness and health. Then buy a gun. Train with it. A lot. Organize with like-minded people. Invest in community defense, look out for LGBT / immigrant / marginalized friends and family. Be prepared for violence, but keep it a last resort. When / if bullets start flying, lives with be ruined on both sides of the gun.

Hear, hear! If anything, this election has proven that we need to work on class consciousness and the Overton window. Mutual aid, direct action, protest & strike support, salting, and civil disobedience are all ways we can produce the conditions needed for positive change.

The purpose of my jellybean thought exercise was to show that “I don’t know” and “I don’t believe” are not mutually exclusive. Basically:

I do not believe [x] != I believe [not x]

I don’t believe in String Theory. String Theory may be correct for all I know: I am not a physicist, and my understanding of String Theory is cursory at best.

Because I do not have enough evidence to warrant belief, I cannot say I believe in String Theory. But that same lack of understanding means I must also say I don’t believe that String Theory is false.

Say you have a jar full of jellybeans. We know that the number of whole jellybeans in the jar must be either even or odd.

If someone asks you if you believe the number of jellybeans in the jar is even, you can and should say “no” if you haven’t counted them or otherwise gathered any evidence to support that conclusion. To believe something is to say you feel it is more likely true than false, and you can’t say that about the given proposition.

Importantly, this does not mean you do believe the number of jellybeans is odd. The fact that one of those two things must be true does not mean you have to pick one to believe and one to disbelieve. It is perfectly rational to reserve belief either way until you have evidence one way or the other. You do not believe it’s even, nor do you believe it’s odd.

So, if we define “atheist” as “someone who does not believe in any gods”, I think you meet the definition of atheist. Just like the person in the above example does not believe the jellybeans are even & also does not believe they are odd, you don’t need to believe “there are no gods anywhere” to not believe “there is at least one god”.

I feel you in a big way, but to be totally fair: corporations becoming states has probably trended towards the better from a zoomed-out perspective, and political leaders lying all the time has probably only become more visible than ever.

The entities that were doing all the colonialism for the past several hundred years have been private companies, and they did huge amounts of slavery and genocide. Blackwater is bad, but the East India Company was worse. This is not to say that things are good now, only that they aren’t like worse than they’ve ever been.

And I think the present day has a greater expectation of political leaders being accountable to the people they govern than most of history. Back in the days of monarchs and oligarchs, there was no mass media to tell everyone they were lying and no likely consequences for the liars even if there were.

Again, I empathize a huge amount with what you’ve said & I am also disappointed that the world we’ve created isn’t better than it is. I just personally think that the above two are trending in a more optimistic direction, even if they’re still objectively pretty bad.

1. Rape does not always involve physically overpowering someone. Someone may coerce someone else into sex with blackmail, lies, threats, or abuse of a position of power.

2. Erections are controlled by a person’s autonomic nervous system. A man can get hard even when he is not turned on or consenting to what is happening.

3. Not all rape involves a penis. A woman who sticks an object into a man without his consent is committing rape. Rape is about power and control over another person, and the rapist need not be directly stimulated for rape to occur.

The search warrant was for the Parmely Avenue residence, but it was issued for a person who hasn’t lived there in more than a year, Price said, sharing the search warrant left by police at the home.

[…]

Price said she learned police had visited the home at least five times within the past year. “The landlord even told [police] she had new tenants,” she said.

This is after the article mentions that they only waited six seconds between knocking on the door and busting in.

If your police department shows this degree of incompetence executing a raid, it should have all its toys taken away. No more flashbangs, no more SWAT gear, no fancy guns. You get the wrong address, you hurt an innocent person, you fail to identify yourselves, you lose privileges. Hell, I seriously question whether they need most of that shit in the first place.

I legitimately believe that a disturbingly high number of these raids that go wrong happen because the cops want to play with with their shiny new equipment.

I mean, good on her for being anti-war and wanting to release political prisoners I guess? I have no clue what she was expecting though. Trying to run against a dictator in a sham election seems like maybe not the best way to effect political change, not to mention dangerous.

I’m glad to see this line of thinking in this thread, even if the “Take 'em all” sentiment seems to be more popular. Over the last 40ish years, gun ownership has slowly trended downwards.

The fact of the matter is, healthy & happy people tend not to shoot themselves or others. Depressed, desparate, jaded, and angry people are the ones out there abusing their 2A rights. Taking away their guns may stop them from using them on people, but it doesn’t feel like a complete solution: you still have people who were unstable enough to commit murder /suicide out there.

I admit I have no data to support this next idea, but my gut feeling is that you could swap the gun laws & density of the US and one of those European coutries we’re always compared to, and the rates of overall violent crime / suicide would not change that drastically.

Java. It’s familiar, it’s the one I use most at my job, and I’m not in love with any other language enough to choose something less pragmatic.

There are plenty of gun laws out there that a reasonable person could see merit in challenging: rules about short-barrel rifles / braces & pot smokers not being able to own guns probably aren’t saving any lives.

The fact that this is the one they go after is just such a demonstration of malintent. There’s good evidence for a relationship between domestic violence and mass shooters.

This should be a bi-partisan slam-dunk. Minimally invasive to law-abiding gun owners, gets guns out of the hands of dangerous criminals. What public good is served in challenging it?

This whole class is on YouTube if you search “Stanford human behavioral biology”. Highly recommend it!

I did some numbers because it sounded fun.

Earth’s diameter is 41.804 million feet. I’m not sure if you meant that or Earth’s circumference when you said “Earth’s surface”, but I figure either one is gonna get us a really big number.

The first result I can find for string comes in a pack that weighs 2.89oz and contains 328 feet of string.

Using that as our standard, you would need 127,452 packs of string (assuming you find a way to perfectly attach them without wasting any length on knots).

127,452 * (2.89 / 16) = 23,021 lbs of string total.

So if we ignore the string stretching, compressing, or breaking, you’d only need to be able to pull 11ish tons of string to ring the bell!

EDIT:

Just for fun: Assuming the motion of the string travels at the speed of sound (I have no idea if it actually would, it just sounds right), there would be about 10.5 hours between you pulling the string and the bell ringing on the other side.

Tools that use a GUI are just as good (if not better) than their CLI equivalents in most cases. There’s a certain kind of dev that just gets a superiority complex about using CLI stuff.