The situation is eerily similar to that of the Crusader States and the Latin Empire in surprise surprise the “Holy Land”.

Not to mention those wars also came as a general result of prosperity and wealth in Christian kingdoms that fought and pushed back against the Islamic states.

Israel has a lot in common with the Latin Empire really. Fully supported by a foreign, far away power with strategic interests in the region.

I mean to be fair I haven’t met the first Venezuelan (I’m literally constantly interacting with all types of Venezuelans day to day) that didn’t want Maduro gone and behind bars, so what happened there is slightly less pure evil and more of a deal with the devil type of situation.

So from themselves?

To be fair, I would very much encourage people to use knives or even guns for self defence before flamethrowers that can cause tons of collateral damage. Fire isn’t exactly something you can direct super clinically at someone without it also spreading everywhere.

Alright. Let’s do this. I’ll bite.

So first thing’s first, this article is clearly click bait and no, the Chinese government isn’t going to start encouraging or even allowing women to simply carry flamethrowers and open fire on any threat like it’s nothing. So let’s start by establishing that we are arguing hypotheticals here over a clearly click bait article.

However, the point of self defence isn’t to provide an equivalent punishment to the crime committed, but to allow someone to use violence preemptively against an aggressor to stay safe. You don’t practice self defense after you get raped, but hopefully before you do.

This opens the door to many difficult and vague situations where it’s hard to tell whether an act was justified or not, but that doesn’t mean that burning someone is necessarily in any way less justifiable than shooting them or stabbing them etc.

So in this hypothetical scenario, the question isn’t whether burning someone is equivalent to being sexually harassed, because that’s not the type of situation that self defence is meant to be used in. It’s not equivalent but rather preemptive.

So we are now asking the question: are women entitled to self defence against sexual harassment? And I’d guess the answer probably lies in the middle of “yes every time” and “never” because no one should get raped for lack of self defence avenues, but also I don’t think someone should get burnt to death for cat calling someone else, no matter how inappropriate I may think it is.

However, if a woman (honestly, any SA victim, not just women) gets touched inappropriately and feels threatened, I think it’s fair to allow her to preemptively attack. So I’d say you can’t argue self defence without the presence of a physical threat. And even then, self defence obviously needs to be clearly outlined to minimise the likelihood of unjustified attacks.

That being said, this is both obviously clickbait and also a terrible idea simply because of how much uncontrolled collateral damage a flamethrower can do to others, structures and even first responders. So yeah, it’s a dumb idea. But I don’t think that’s because sexual assault is not a basis for self defence, rather because flamethrowers are extraordinarily unsafe weapons for everyone involved.

Even in Latin American countries where protections are weaker, this would be considered wildly unacceptable. Only Americans would do this

To be fair, that’s in a completely different ballpark from it being a genocide.

And honestly, I don’t know enough about this to make a claim either way

I don’t think it’s a matter of “accepting” but rather it being mostly community maintained, and so languages with minimal communities get no moderation.

I’m from a so-called “3rd world dump” and not even, because our death squads aren’t as well-armed to kill civilians.

Then again, there may be a lot wrong with my country, but we definitely do not share America’s problems in the first place.

I’m mostly fine with OTCs being advertised. Like idk Tylenol double mega effectiveness or whatever.

But every country I’ve ever visited or lived in heavily restricts ads for more serious medical stuff, except for some reason the US.

I guess if your scale goes from 11 to 11.5, then the former is still closer to -11

Ah yes, the infamous MAGA face

Which tbf is more of an American dumb psyop than anything logical.

People in Japan only get orthodontics when they need them and they have the longest life expectancy in the world. No one cares if your teeth are a little crooked. But as always, the US is obsessed with the most plastic and unnecessarily expensive version of yourself you can aspire to be.

Wonderfully put. If people really want to make MAGA go away, they need to first understand the underlying structure.

90% of MAGAts aren’t taking RFK seriously. But he’s there to appeal to the 10% that want him there. Now who’s that group? Mostly the people that opposed the health measures put forth during the pandemic. Remember that anti-health and even anti-vax groups were extremely small and irrelevant before the pandemic. The (in my opinion) justifiably tough measures we had to endure unfortunately created disenfranchised individuals who felt attacked and wanted revenge on the system afterwards. MAGA offered a place for them to go to. Some of them aren’t actively anti-LGBT or anti-immigration, but they thought the other side tried to poison them and their kids, therefore they’re bad, therefore let’s vote Republican.

That’s how everything works. The anti-immigrant crowd doesn’t really care about vaccines for the most part. But they’ve seen too many tiktoks of brown people shoplifting or doing X or Y bad thing. So now they feel the country has been taken over by a hostile mob of aliens. ICE and Kristy Noem appeal to that crowd.

Meanwhile, Technofascists probably aren’t anti-health and also probably don’t care too much about immigration, but they absolutely hate regulations, taxes for the wealthy and want to make as much money in digital grifting as possible. So they ally with the religious nuts, the anti-vax nuts and the racists because they can make more money.

The incels and contrarians are mostly internet edgelords who saw far too many blue-haired libs and women trying to ruin video games for them, so they grouped together to bring down wokeness. Because to them, wokeness ruined fun, ruined Star Wars and Ghostbusters and a bunch of other things they feel were ruined by Hollywood. This was the main group in charge of radicalising younger people.

And the Christian right is a mix of all of the above, but take the hardcore churchgoers from every group.

There are others. Anti-trans, anti-LGBT, etc. Each group has actually little to do with the other. Like the anti-Hollywood incel crowd is extremely antisemitic, while the Technofascist crowd claims to be super pro-Jewish (they’re only pro-Israel). In theory they should be opposed to each other. But MAGA is the temporary truce between them to fight this hypothetical common enemy.

That’s why they’ve fabricated this idea of the Antifa domestic terrorist in kahoots with the immigrant criminal gangster. They need to idealize these two groups as part of the larger problem because if they don’t, the entire MAGA movement collapses.

Therefore, fascism in the US can realistically only be stopped by:

• The internal collapse of MAGA: Infighting or a big enough issue to make the gap between them insurmountable.

• Military intervention: the armed forces or other groups with enough control of violence and weapons overthrow the government.

• A civil war: the country reaches a breaking point and devolves into full on insurrection movements, separationist movements, and renders MAGA useless as it becomes the only allowed ideology in one of the two (or more) combatants.

I know people on Lemmy love the idea of insurrections and revolutions. But if someone doesn’t want to see a lot of bloodshed in the next few years, then they’d be hoping for one of the first two options.

Lol, is that sarcasm (it’s hard to tell online sometimes)

Despacito is absolutely not Bad Bunny. That’s Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee

To be fair, a lot of his last album is way more interesting than what he’s known for in Spanish speaking countries.

Like Turista or Lo que le pasó a Hawaii are actually pretty good and the lyrics aren’t just horny bait either. The man has grown into a voice for more than just sex, booze and party.

I mean, they are chuds. That already tells you exactly what demographic it is.

Yes but it’s also perfectly valid to want your social media experience to be exclusively for easy non political entertainment.

I don’t need to think about that stuff during the five minutes of free time I have between other stuff. I want to see crafts or animals or learn about geography or languages. An apolitical social media experience does not make an apolitical life or individual.

Honestly, with adequate governance, companies would be required to submit reports on how much labor they’re doing using AI, and pay those wages to either their employees or to a sort of “Universal Income” fund to prop up families in poverty. It should be called the AI tax.

The problem is that, with the current state of affairs, asking for regulation from anyone is impossible, and also even if the law were enacted, getting the money from the companies to people who need it instead of the ultra-rich is a major hurdle.

But at the very least, I don’t think we should allow companies to simply cut down on human labor without also contributing economically to the employees they cut off.

I don’t think anyone is dying to fill in Excel spreadsheets or to write corporate emails. No one is complaining about AI doing those jobs, but about people who lost their livelihoods because of it.

It’s quite poetic innit