I think it was volunteers who had taken on the responsibility of responding to threats to the protesters. They weren’t specially blessed to be armed, just wearing vests to let other people know they were friendly and carrying for defense. The guy with the rifle was probably also legally allowed to carry a weapon but was doing it in a way that seemed threatening.

The person who was killed was not the potential attacker.

What OP said was enough was to keep doing this. It’s not a one and done nor is on the wrong path.

Like do an insurrection? Because I’m pretty sure mass anti-Trump protests are not a prime location to find people who didn’t already vote against him.

Yeah, people misunderstand how citizen protests work when they talk about protest organizers like they’re in charge. Maybe they filed some papers with city hall and did some promotion, but there’s no such thing as “protest leadership”.

So… regulate the other market. The purpose of the regulated marijuana industry is to have it regulated, not to protect those companies from competition.

Being idiots and being wrong doesn’t mean you lose fights. If it wasn’t risky to attack Biden, despite the blatantly obvious need to get him out, it wouldn’t have taken weeks of nobodies trickling out in opposition before anyone of significance took the step.

Hogg being more directly hostile to centers of power in the Democratic party would absolutely not have made him win the fight to keep his position in the power structure. Thinking that’s how politics works is just delusional.

Lol, sure bud. Likewise.

Biden’s brain was melting live on stage and it was still considered extremely risky to call for him to step aside. Schumer is just bad at his job and failing to meet the moment. There’s no way Hogg comes away better both by publicly declaring his enemies list and including one of the most powerful members of the party on it.

The thin shields could also help against pepper spray. People going to protests where police violence is expected really should be wearing face (or at least eye) protection.

They’ve been told for years that if they let their guard down or give an inch of kindness they’re going to be killed by dangerous minority criminals, and that just made them more violent. They ride around in military surplus vehicles like they’re going to be dodging mortar fire and regularly kill unarmed people because they “feared for their lives”. They’d need to be experiencing significant and sustained violence before it becomes anything but validating their worldview.

If they give up their sidearms they can’t use “he reached for my gun” as justification for their deadly response.

Yeah, but “plant owner” is an even more reliable indicator of political affiliation than geography.

We appreciate the perspective. I would say my concern is that there won’t be much of a cost for going along and abusing citizens. There are a lot of voices on the left of our political spectrum that are very much stuck in the “law and order” and “back the blue” mindset, so even when those forces are clearly contributing to the degradation of orderly society, no one is willing to put pressure on them from above. And pressure from below is met with extreme force that’s then propagandized by our news media to be a justified reaction and that anything less than full compliance with law enforcement is inherently illegitimate.

The cops are mostly already aligned with the American right, they’ve been training to be “warriors” for decades, and the left of center power centers never want to criticize them. Some of them got tired during BLM and would whine about not being appreciated enough, but that’s mostly still just a social consequence, and they have so so many voices calling them heroes and encouraging them to be even worse.

Greenland isn’t a particularly hard place to conquer. It’s a tiny population and we literally already have military there. The challenge isn’t tactical, it’s diplomatic. It’d be a lot more meaningful to ask whether we have contingencies for war with Europe or losing all our bases there.

These aren’t undocumented workers. These are the ones “doing it right”.

Adding to Scardina’s annoyance, the men had valid work permits and pending asylum applications, according to their attorney Regilucia Smith. “They are legally here,” she said. “Valid work permit, not even close to expired… again, no criminal records—not here, not in Nicaragua.”

Don’t accept money from Nazis.

Because there’s no reason to write a headline that implies this is an open question. The answer is no, and implying it could be anything but no is irresponsible. Someone reading a headline alone should be told that so if that’s all they read they don’t think the answer is more complicated than that.

This is unhinged. Someone building the mainline of an interoperable communication service should absolutely be helping others making software trying to interoperate with it. Complaints can be made about Rochko rejecting PRs, but complaining that other people’s time is going towards a thing they don’t want is insane.

“So they reached out to us and we had conversations about what they want to do, how they can do it, and we had more detailed conversations about how to do X, how to do Y protocol-wise. We helped them resolve some issues when they launched their first test of the federation because we want to see them succeed with this plan, so we help them debug and troubleshoot some of the stuff that they’re doing. Basically, we’re talking with each other about whatever issues come up.”

But from the perspective of hundreds of instances have signed the anti-Meta FediPact, and hundreds more are blocking Threads without signing the pact, any resources devoted to to improving the Threads/Mastodon integration are wasted.