They’re saying that, when a bullet is fired from an ancient gun and ricochets off of hard objects, then that bullet will likely be mangled beyond identification. This means that there is not enough evidence to positively connect the bullet to the gun in court. This is normal.
I think there’s a list of questionable things about Crooks and the FBI allegations. The timeline, the re-assembly of the gun, the sketchy discord messages, etc. This bullet doesn’t make the list.
Give 1 child a vaccine.
Shoot 1 child in the head.
Under your logic, these two are equal, and cancel each other out.
US imperialism is a disease, please get well soon.
what if not stopping the IRGC ends up causing orders-of-magnitude more suffering and deaths?
This is the logic of preemptive war, and it is blatantly illegal under the UN charter. This type of logic is very dangerous because it can justify any war without evidence.
Would Hamas not be vastly worse than Israel if they had the same military power as Israel? ISIS?
How could they possibly be worse than Israel, who is invading it’s neighbors, starting wars for territory, doing ethnic cleansing, and threatening to drop nukes?
I agree that I do not want to see a Hamas government, and an ISIS government would be horrific, but history shows these type of groups form as a direct result of imperial violence.
Israel funded Hamas and killed it’s more moderate competitors. Hamas’ early leaders like Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi were scholars and academics, serious people interested in peace. Israel killed them and their families, and their successors, over and over until you end up with a violent, uneducated leader like Yahya Sinwar.
The US acted similarly when we meddled in the Syrian civil war, giving weapons and money to ISIS.
Shouldn’t intent count to prevent access to biological and nuclear weapons?
I don’t know how this would work at all. How do you measure intent? Does the US have good intent with its nuclear arsenal? Russia? Pakistan?
I think your question has 2 logical conclusions:
Why does desire matter?
I have a desire to kill billionaires. Does that matter? Should I be tried for murder? No, because I’m not actually going to kill anyone.
Putting violent desire on the same moral plane as actual murder victims is a silly thing to do.
Do you think that if the socioeconomic positions were reversed, the current Iranian regime would have been any better than the US, or Israel?
In this hypothetical the details really matter, but in general I think no, the current Iranian regime would not be better.
I think a better hypothetical would be that, if the US never did a coup in Iran and overthrow their democratically elected government, and the socioeconomic positions were reversed, would Iran be better then? I think yes.
I don’t think it’s nitpicking at all. There is a serious difference between thousands of dead and millions of dead.
Anyone who ignores that reality is downplaying the evil that the US has wrought.
I’m not forgetting that at all. I have critical support for Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Huthis in their struggle for freedom and territorial integrity against genocidal Israel.
It is Israel’s invasions and apartheid that causes unrest in the whole region.
America has funded more terror groups in the region than Iran has.
And in terms of numbers of dead, the number of people killed by Iran’s proxies is just another rounding error.
Obviously they’re both evil, but calling them “equal” feels like hegemonic propaganda. What makes them equal?
Over the years, Iran has murdered 10s of thousands of people. Over the decades, a good estimate is in the hundreds of thousands of people murdered.
For the American and Israeli death tolls, you’re going to have to add two zeroes to those numbers.
The Iranian murders are a rounding error when compared to the death America has been exporting for decades.
Unfortunately the hard data on UHC’s denial rate is not public information. The company wouldn’t want all the bad publicity that would come with transparency.
There would be other signs, though. For example, UHC investors suing to increase the denial rate.
The lawsuit argues that the company’s changing corporate practices in the wake of Thompsons murder have been too consumer-friendly, and the investors’ profits are suffering as a result.
You might be right, maybe he was a chud all along, idk.
But c’mon, it’s obvious the stroke broke his brain. Before the stroke he was giving 10 minutes speeches from memory, after the stroke he can’t finish a sentence.
How long do you think that position will last?
If energy infrastructure is destroyed, then “paying a little bit extra at the pump” is just the beginning. You will need to reduce your overall consumption by 15-20%.
Remember the worst month of Covid? That’s the last time consumption was reduced so heavily. Now imagine that Covid lifestyle for 5 years as energy infrastructure is rebuilt.
The joy of Trump’s downfall will not be enough to mask the real economic pain, unfortunately.
Yes, I was never attempting to steelman OP’s argument. I was pointing out the flaws of the argument as it is given.
Steelmanning is a tool that is helpful in many situations, but that does not mean it is useful in every situation. Perhaps there is an ideal version of OP’s argument, a steelman, that I would agree with. But the actual argument that OP laid out is not ideal, it is hypocritical, and I am pointing that out.
A student who gets a poor grade on a paper does not get to go to the professor and ask them to “steelman” their argument for a better grade. The paper is judged as it is written.
This whole post is about OP taking issue with criticism.
OP’s snarky reference to free speech is hypocritical on its face. The entire thesis of their post is to attack criticism, and criticism is a form of free speech.
Pointing out hypocrisy is not a strawman.
Did you like it when he bombed hospitals?
Did you like it when he promised to pull out, but instead surged troops?
Did you like it when he supported the rise of ISIS in Syria?
Did you like it when he betrayed the Kurds?
Did you like it when he abandoned Egypt’s Mubarek, leading to the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood?
Did you like it when he expanded drone warfare, killing hundreds of innocent people?
Yeah he’s better than trump/Republicans, but his failed policies have normalized the Bush-era crimes and have enabled the Trump-era crimes.
Whitewashing Obama’s disgusting, bloodstained legacy only serves to further degrade our national morality and enable the worst excesses of American fascism.
We did that already, we voted for the people who suck less.
They are letting the GOP run wild.
PLEASE do not nominate another candidate with a vagina
It’s so frustrating when well-meaning people have this blatantly sexist take.
The problem with Hillary and Kamala was not their vaginas, it was their policies.
If you actually believe that the US is too sexist to elect a woman, then you need to explain the election of Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico. By every statistic (rape, domestic violence, etc), Mexico is a more sexist nation than the US, yet they overwhelmingly elected a woman.
True, but your comment seems to ignore the fact that leftism is the only resistance to fascism. Liberalism and civility politics have historically paved the way for fascism, and the same pattern is proving true in the modern era.
We need leftist solidarity to defeat the evils of liberalism and fascism.
So your idea is that we will vote in Democrat politicians who will… Legislate themselves out of power by instituting ranked choice voting?
This part of your plan seems absurd on its face. I want ranked choice voting as much as you, but we need a realistic plan, and what you’re proposing is a pipe dream.
Voting third party is more realistic than expecting Dems to institute ranked choice.
By 1970, it was fully criminalized nationally esp. because of the whole drug culture of the late 60’s and the Vietnam anti-war protest movement.
“You want to know what this was really all about?
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
-John Ehrlichman, President Richard Nixon’s domestic policy chief
Nate Bronze keeps falling lower. He started as a serious data analyst, now he’s writing clickbait articles, desperate for attention.
I guess Harry Enten was the real star at FiveThirtyEight. Holy toledo.