Specifically, they are implied with the whole “call up the National Guard under the Insurrection Act and send them out to kick doors in looking for illegals, especially in liberal strongholds.” I am sure they will act strictly under the color of the law and adhere only to these reasonable, publicly stated goals.

On an unrelated note, TM 31-210 is an informative, engaging, and entertaining coffee table read, if anyone is looking for that sort of thing.

A cheap springer airsoft pistol works pretty good in my experience

I’ve thought about this a lot. I think its more the sheer oversaturation of “culture” than it is a true lack of imagination. People alive today consume exponentially greater amounts of “culture” (for the broadest term possible) than anyone ever before, and it’s not even close.

When tech enables you to experience a movie or a video game or a performer 30 years after the death of everyone involved, in essentially the same fidelity as the day it debuted, “old culture” has a much harder time making way for “new culture.” If Star Wars exists, why care about Rebel Moon or whatever that movie was called?

I think the public consciousness can only maintain cognizance and interest in so much, but at the same time creatives are constantly adding to the Culture Pile. But the more tech enables us to hold on to our past, it becomes more and more difficult to move on, and the majority of new stuff goes unwanted and unappreciated. And so the mass market dives into keeping the old alive with reboots, remakes, remasters, and now AI recreations, because that’s what people respond to.

They do this literally all the time, not to normalize the idea, but to desensitize you to the accusation. That way, when they do something that is actually fascist, like calling up the Kansas National Guard under the Insurrection Act to go door-kicking in Chicago for illegal immigrants, your brain enters a thought-terminating state of “nothing-burger, both sides, etc.”

Example, they liked to use the word “insurrection” a lot about anything Democrats did following J6.

If the only families pumping out kids are Christian crackpots, that’s a win for them. They want to out-breed you.

They wanted to impede the soft power of China in the region. It does make sense in a realpolitik kind of way, but someone with a fucking conscience in the command chain should have stopped this.

The only thing Bethesda is motivated to do, frothing, absolutely chomping at the bit, is figure out a way to successfully monetize modded content.

No, they absolutely used it as a ground-attack incendiary and have admitted as such. They were not flushed out by being illuminated, they were flushed out with choking smoke and burning shit raining down on their positions.

Even if they did only use illumination flares, there are considerations against using them in civilian areas in ways that can start fires or otherwise cause injury to civilians.

The legal issue is moot because the US was not an adherent to these laws until 2009.

The US used the same weapons in Fallujah and likely elsewhere. They called it “shake and bake” when they first fired WP artillery to draw enemy fighters out, then followed up with conventional artillery to kill them.

Nobody can hold the US accountable, so they’re not going to hold their rabid dog accountable either.

And naturally it’s a reverse-engineered BD Spot, likely even down to the software. Why put money into R&D when your adversaries do it for you?

A lot of the pilgrims were the fundamentalist crazies that Europe didn’t want, and the towns they founded had laws like this and more.

To me, the wording of the Israeli statement implies it was them, though of course it’s not 100% certain. If they had even the flimsiest proof to pin it on Hamas they would go public with it immediately.

A solar storm of that scale wouldn’t just take down Facebook and Twitter for a while, it could destroy critical power infrastructure around the globe that would take months to repair. People would die.

Last I knew they called the Russia-Ukraine war the “NATO War in Ukraine” and claimed Russia killed over 10,000 “NATO mercenaries” mostly from Germany.

“Having the strength to do the dirty work” has been a euphemism for committing selfish, barbaric atrocities for…forever, basically. A lot of the people prosecuted for Abu Ghraib used similar justification, for example.

It’s exactly the kind of ethics the GOP wants from their kingpins when they subvert democracy: the capacity to react murderously to disobedience.

The GOP decision-makers see the Russian oligarchy and how freely they leech their wealth from the public and say “I want that.”

The MAGA followers see modern Russian society as a bastion of “western” (white) moral traditionalism holding out against progressive globalist degeneracy where none of this “woke” shit flies.

They have more in common with modern Russia than they do with modern America. They want the US to be more like Russia and many will be willing to spill American blood to get there.

My take is that it’s a joke of “what anarchists think they do” as the top comic vs “what anarchists actually do” as the dilapidated trap house.

I’m not an anarchist but something tells me that going to Lemmy to shit on anarchists wouldn’t be well-received.

Didn’t the Serbian legislative body fucking gas themselves with CS a few years back?

You’re not wrong, but tackling a nuclear power like Russia probably takes more nuance than taking on Saddam or Milosevic.

The Republicans definitely tie our hands even on measured responses, and I hope history remembers them as the degenerate traitors they are.