Is it free if you have to conduct geological surveys to find the material, then do a bunch of digging to pull it out of the ground, then run a massive refining operation to get a moderately useful amount?

Or, gun ownership will just become more expensive.

“How did the nobles become noble in the first place, hmm? They took it, at the tip of a sword.”

Wait why are we killing bears?

Donald Trump isn’t going to get rid of the FBI, he’s going to purge any non-loyalists and turn it into his private secret police and use it to persecute his political rivals and journalists who tell the truth about him.

Anyone with more than 2 brain cells they can knock together is worried about what Trump plans to do to the FBI.

Here it is, and listed right here in this community. Did you look for it at all? Or were you just failing at trying to make a point?

OK, so the Taliban literally have a history of selling women into slavery.

Recent history.

Now it is clear from the testimony of witnesses and officials of the new government that the ruling clerics systematically abducted women from the Tajik, Uzbek, Hazara and other ethnic minorities they defeated. Stolen women were a reward for victorious battle. And in the cities of Kabul, Mazar-i-Sharif, Jalalabad and Khost, women victims tell of being forced to wed Taliban soldiers and Pakistani and Arab fighters of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network, who later abandoned them. These marriages were tantamount to legalized rape. “They sold these girls,” says Ahmad Jan, the Kabul police chief. “The girls were dishonored and then discarded.”

Also, child marriage is common practice:

Half of all girls are married by the age of 15.

If you can’t grasp the difference between how women are treated by the Taliban in Afghanistan and how they are treated in the US, then you aren’t qualified to have an opinion on this subject.

The GOP’s policies in the US are oppressive and horrific, but they are still a very far distance away from actual state-sanctioned human trafficking.

low quality

~(because it’s 498x615 pixels, not because of the content)~

XDefiant?

It’s not about swinging farther to the right. This is about turning the FBI into the SS, which should scare everybody regardless of their political stance or their feelings about law enforcement agencies.

Hahhh… well really, the only way to test backups is to try to restore from them. VMs are extremely helpful for this - you can try to restore a VM mirror of your production system, see if it works as expected, wipe it and start over if it doesn’t.

Just a little authoritarian oopsie-doodle, no big deal.

what in the name of AI-generated gothic horror is going on here?

It’s even reflected in the water.

Well no, North Vietnam repelled the US with China’s military force (mostly just manpower/cannon fodder). But regardless, saying that the war was economic doesn’t mean that one side’s economy must be superior to the other’s in order to “win”. The Vietnam war is actually a good example of an asymmetric situation, because North Vietnam’s economic capacity really had no bearing on the outcome. The war was astronomically expensive for the US, which had spent US$168 billion by 1970. Adjusted to 2019 dollars this is US$843.63 billion, making it the 4th most expensive conflict in US history.

Vietnam didn’t have to out-produce the US, they just had to drag the conflict out until it became too costly to sustain.

To put it another way, it’s not a question of how much war you can afford, it’s a question of how much war you can force the other guy to pay for, and what he can afford.

Why not?

anyone who calls you a Russian propagandist

This is in fact a propaganda piece. It presents no information, only opinions. It makes only vague accusations, not specific examples of the “lies” which could be discussed or disproven.

Claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

it’s mighty convenient how Russia being tied up in Ukraine

This sentence implies that “the western empire” is somehow to blame for Russia not getting to invade and conquer a neighbor quickly and easily, and that that’s a bad thing.

If Russia finds “being tied up in Ukraine” inconvenient, I can think of one way they could resolve that… go the fuck home.

Yes, ask questions, be skeptical, don’t take the official story at face value… but don’t accept answers to those questions from Putin sympathizers.

Beyond that, it’s hard to get people who are comfortable in their lives to get up and go to war. If the nation is stable internally, if the people aren’t desperate and angry, if they don’t feel like they should have more - you know, for themselves - it’s hard to get a motivated, aggressive military staffed and ready to attack their neighbors.

But also yes, an army marches on its stomach. Every major offensive beyond a nation’s borders ends when the supply chain falters.

In the end, all wars are economic.

Agile is extremely dysfunctional

objectification and sexualization