To whatever extent that terrorism and war are spectate, it’s only a way for those in power to tell uninformed people which violence to support or who to hate. “We’re going to war to bring freedom” vs “Those terrorists are attacking the [colonial] government!”

Looks basically the same as the previous gen. I guess it’s marginally thinner?

This is how I would describe my experience. Sometimes it’s crunch time and most of the time it’s fuck around time. After crunch time I always throw a tantrum about how if we only bothered with planning we could largely avoid it.

Putin also wins by a landslide. It’s easy to do if you ban all the competition.

It’s a small price for freedom

The second sentence is true. They’re inducing famine conditions but allowing an extremely small amount of food in.

Oh nice, didn’t know that. Sponsorblock is also available on Safari but it’s a few dollars I think.

It’s great but does it block ads?

I doubt they would replace a smartphone for people unless it was small and comfortable enough that you would want to wear it 24/7. Smartphones succeeded because of the convenience, I can check my phone at my desk, in bed, while walking, while pooping. Unless it shrinks down to a pair of glasses I don’t see it happening, and even then input is a whole other problem, touchscreens are insanely intuitive.

If you genuinely believe that the US is a true democracy for and by the people, I have a bridge to sell you. Get a group of people together and declare independence and see how far you get before the police or military come after you.

I mean fuck trump but he should be entitled to the same process as anybody else

Who controls what is lawful though? Hint: just another terrorist organization

They block most of it and murder the people distributing it on a regular basis

Congratulations, you’ve realized terrorist is a meaningless word. Governments throw it around to tell us who to hate but ultimately it means nothing.

100% agree, the difference is entirely political.

I agree with the part that labeling organizations is mostly pointless, if not harmful. An underlying goal in my intentional conflation here is that the difference is pointless. Hopefully someone read that and was like “huh I guess these two things aren’t all that different”. Governments call the violent armed forces they like “militaries” and the ones they don’t like “terrorists”.

I mean, if enforced with violence, sure. Usually that’s the job of the police, which are terrorist organizations. Some companies may also hire private mercenaries instead of using the state police, which serve the same function.

Yes of course the UN definition is going to be carefully crafted to make the violence committed by its member states “legal” and the actions committed by anyone else “illegal”.

Who makes the official rules of war? Who decides who follows those rules and who doesn’t? Obviously the practical answer is the UN, ICC, ICJ, etc, but note that the UN is itself made up of countries that all field militaries. They write the rules such that they’re in, and others who are less powerful are out. And as we’ve seen recently, they don’t even apply the rules uniformly. Russia and the US have committed war crimes in their invasions of Ukraine and Iraq respectively, but the general consensus is that their militaries are still not terrorist organizations. Or arguably the most clear example, the IDF. Few organizations could claim to commit more war crimes with such predictability and regularity than the IDF. Yet most of the world considers them legitimate, but considers groups like ISIS to not be, even though conduct wise they’re similarly abhorrent.

The rules of war are basically “if you win it’s ok” and everything else is just politics.

Terrorism is any act that uses violence or fear of violence for a political goal. This is what militaries do, if you threaten them they use violence to suppress or kill you. Some of them are more successful than others, but fundamentally whether it’s a group of rebels or the military of a nation state, they use violence to force everyone within their controlled territory to submit to their authority.