All of this fuss over various non-aligned messaging services is solely to further entrench imperial surveillance capabilities.

If it had anything to do with their usual excuses of counter-terrorism or child abuse they could just use the resources at their disposal and deal with most of it. Even when people use encrypted messaging the rest of their opsec is sloppy enough to find a way in if you’re so motivated.

After reading the article and looking into this Dr. Busby I feel like caution is necessary.

While I wouldn’t put it past the imperialists to use nuclear weapons, the author has taken some questionable positions in the past. The again said positions are merely not in line with the narrative the imperialist project presents, so maybe there’s nothing to be concerned about here.

The UN for example stated in 2006 that his claims of DU munitions being used In Kosovo and Iraq (part two) are empirically false, but since then the US and NATO have admitted to it.

He has a very strange theory of radiation effects on humans, one which doesn’t at all match with long established evidence, the mainstream theory, nor more modern theories.

He also claimed the Fukushima disaster (and Chernobyl) was much worse than it’s generally agreed to be, and was selling some sort of anti-radiation pill of questionable effectiveness to Japanese people in the area.

The people who already mentioned cold fusion in this thread have made good points as well. I can’t find much on this Del Guidice character but there’s a bit in the German Wikipedia entry noting that his and his collaborator Giuliano Preparata’s ideas on cold fusion and the “memory of water” were not well accepted amongst peers.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory director Harold Brown and Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev both described neutron bombs as a “capitalist bomb”, because it was designed to destroy people while preserving property.

Of course.

It’s just how people were back then. You have to evaluate people as a product of their times. Just because he was a rapist, plagiarist, cop, anti-semitic, homophobic, and liked Hitler doesn’t mean he was wrong about evil totalitarian stalinism! /s

Also true.

Didn’t Orwell say he couldn’t bring himself to dislike Hitler?

Some slave owners like Jeff Bezos are so nice that they even thank their slaves for all their hard work that they did to send their master into space for a couple seconds on a phallic rocket.

As far as I’ve seen it’s just libs who are desperate to smear him. It’s embrassing having your only talking points dismantled with primary sources.

The US isn’t even the best at that grift. Germany spent about double that over a decade while emissions increased.

IIRC his wife admitted at some point that Gulag Archipelago was a work of fiction.

I’m only superficially familiar with Fisher’s concept of capitalist realism, but it speaks to the same idea. As the tagline on his book says, is there no alternative?

I feel this. It’s also something I try to talk about with others, but I always have the feeling that it falls on deaf ears. At best I get general uncomittal agreement and some liberal platitudes about how this is just the way things are in return.

This is so insidious. I can’t believe how bad things have gotten in Alberta since the NDP government, and it’s not like the “Progressive Conservatives” were a particular good ruling party for nearly fifty years.

Sometimes I ask people what made Trump so uniquely bad. The only answer I’ve gotten so far, one which can’t be applied to every other US president, is his unfiltered and brash communication style.

I also think that Trump was good vis a vis nations in the US sphere of influence. The leaders of those countries started thinking about what happens when they’re not the US’ puppets. Unfortunately those thoughts were all forgotten as soon as Biden was elected, as everything went back to normal.

Can’t have wars between nations if you don’t teach people that other nations exist or aren’t truly sovereign.

Given the detention in France I think the broader context of encryption policy in the EU is relevant as well.

The EU parliament has had multiple draft laws proposed over the past few years that intend to break private communication for everyday citizens. The proposals are varied, from the inclusion of backdoors to a requirement that service providers scan all messages for “CSM” (I put this in quotes because the content they actually want to track has nothing to do with minors and everything to do with class power). IIRC the current proposal is to just break SSL entirely by forcing browsers to accept certificates issued by the EU itself.

With seemingly random “terror” attacks occurring within the EU recently I can imagine that this will once again be used as the causus belli to go after private messaging and working class access to encryption. The politically motivated detention of the founder of Telegram is almost certainly part of the broader strategy to be able to surveil the thoughts of European citizens, residents, and guests. It’s also worth noting that the founder of Telegram was already detained by some US alphabet agencies (FBI maybe?) years ago.

That makes sense. I’m thinking of this all with a cis male body and bias. As are firearms manufacturers I’m sure.

Doesn’t the SCAR have a telescoping stock? I could be mixing things up though. It’s been over a decade since I paid much attention to firearms.

Until 2018 the Democrats even allowed their “superdelegates” (typically elected officials from the state levels) to vote for whoever they wanted, no faithless action required. That could (and maybe did?) swing candidate selection, as superdelegates make up 15% of the total.

There’s a bunch of different categories so I’ll keep it general.

A delegate is someone who votes at the national party convention on behalf of the people who voted in the state or district party primary election for a given presidential candidate.

It’s basically the electoral college but for the party.

Aren’t most modern ones ambidextrous? Either in that the ejection port can be placed on either side, or like the P90 design where the brass comes out the bottom. I can imagine mag changes being awkward depending on the location and necessary movements.

How were they awkward to hold in your experience? I have no hands on experience with bullpups but my sense of balance makes me think they’re better with the center of mass closer to your body.