101–110 of 301 posts
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Calling it the “partition of India” makes it seem like it was imposed on India rather than being a product of the 1940 Lahore Resolution where Jinnah led calls for a separate Pakistan. And in retrospect, it was a huge boon to India and Bangladesh to separate themselves from Pakistan.
What I meant is that British India didn't exactly spawn out of a handshake between Allah & Mahavishnu.
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I have regretted everyone that I ever voted for. Every candidate will ultimately be regrettable, because it’s not the candidate that’s bad - it is the system itself that has become irredeemably corrupt.
A friend went to an Obama rally in '08 when he came to town. Later he said, I'm sure I'll regret voting for him, but I'm also pretty sure I'll regret it less than most votes I've taken.
"Well, I picked the one I hated most and put that at the bottom of the list. Then worked up from there."
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It was a crazy time, not in the danger from hijackings but the enormous amount of fear and cowardice America built up within itself. It was crazy because of the mass hysteria not the violence. Take this example: 1.2 million Americans died from Covid. 3000 americans died in the twin towers attack. That's 0.25% of the number that died from covid. However we gave up considerably more liberty to defend against the hijack…
1.2M Americans died with Covid, maybe.
Even Trump's CDC admits it was 1.2 million deaths FROM covid.
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I am still amazed by the typical internet American's (Yours also I presume) love for voting, despite having long degraded into a two-party charade. Your sentiment starts out fierce: "constantly, actively..." and is immediately cut short "... choose to (only?) vote it that way." You point out that voicing one's interpretations of the 2nd amendment is powerless - but voting, reduced to such a miniscule gesture, is also…
This is why it is important to vote in primary elections as well.
Let's say in the main election 45% of the population will vote for whatever candidate represents side X, 45% of the population will vote for whatever candidate represents side Y, and 10% is more-or-less in the middle.
If, during the primaries, side X votes for a far-X candidate, they will definitely lose the middle 10% to a moderate-Y candidate, leading to a strong Y victory. But if side X votes for a moderate-X candidate during the primaries, the main election will be moderate-X vs moderate-Y, and they have a pretty good chance of securing the slightly-more-than-half of the middle they need for an X victory.
Of course you now end up with a lukewarm moderate X victor who isn't going to represent your far-X views, but at least you're not dealing with an even worse Y-side victor.
The real solution is to get rid of the winner-takes-all system inherently resulting in a two-party election, but Good Luck doing that kind of overhaul!
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Calling it the “partition of India” makes it seem like it was imposed on India rather than being a product of the 1940 Lahore Resolution where Jinnah led calls for a separate Pakistan. And in retrospect, it was a huge boon to India and Bangladesh to separate themselves from Pakistan.
It was a boon economically but people died. Millions of people died due to the actions of a few aristocrats and religious zealots. Probably the greatest humanitarian crisis in the last millennium. And the partition of India is the well accepted term for the event. I'm not going to be drawn into some post colonial syntactic argument in a discussion about the very real deaths if very real people as well as the human tr…
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> We are more or less retracing the path of Rome as the Republic expanded militarily until it was no longer practical to run it as a republic and it transitioned to empire. The current military "excursion" seems to be transitioning the US out of being an empire.
Rome took some unexpected Ls against the barbarians too. Didn’t change the trajectory of the empire.
I wonder if the USA is going the same way. Democratic Church of America?
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How old are you? I think a lot of younger folks don't fully adjust for important factors: plane hijackings used to be much more common, 9/11 was committed by the second group of Islamic terrorists who tried to blow up the World Trade Center, and 9/11 was the third major terrorist attack by Al-Qaeda in a 4 year span. It's easy now to say that it was a crazy worst-case scenario, but that was not at all obvious then; fo…
> younger folks don't fully adjust for important factors: plane hijackings used to be much more common https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings (I can not say how comprehensive that wikipedia list is). There's more in the 70s and 80s than I was expecting (having lived through the 80s), but given how many flights there are, hijackings have been and are exceedingly rare; and most of these are not even…
The Entebbe raid was the canonical example, playing out as it did over a full week: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entebbe_raid
And there had been another hijacking just the week before that one.
You can quote statistics at people all you want, but when something like a plane hijacking is happening nearly two out of every three months on average (throughout the entire 1970s), and sometimes on a weekly basis, and making a big splash in the media every time, people are going to want something to change.
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I don't know why that would be the case, but let's say it is. An overzealous cop and prosecutor can, with a little luck, use the power of the state to get you executed or imprisoned for life for a crime you didn't commit. If you had to choose one of those, which one would you prefer?
The cop and prosecutor. At least three people would have to be stupid to take my life, versus zero people at Google
And that has happened many times. It is not as improbable as you seem to think.
I really can't understand the thought process of someone who thinks it would better to have their life taken than their job. You know you can just...get a new job, right?
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"Real excesses" is a bit of an understatement. There is the security theater instituted by the TSA, the militarization of police, normalized Islamophobia, mass surveillance of U.S. citizens, torture as an official military policy, indefinite detention of "unlawful combatants", a trillion dollars spent destroying Iraq and Afghanistan, a million killed and many more made refugees. The rise of ISIS and the refugee crise…
I would point to the TSA as a key example of what I'm talking about. You say "security theater", but which of the things they do are security theater, and which are the ones that drove plane hijackings to near-zero? We can make reasonable guesses, but does another major skyscraper get blown up if we guess wrong? It's not so easy, and it was hard to the point of impossibility in the aftermath of 9/11. > The Middle Eas…
9/11 itself was. The general view before 9/11 was that a hijacking is an inconvenience: you get an unexpected detour via Cuba and have a nice story to tell at the next holiday party, but that's about it.
The second it became clear that the plane itself was the weapon and that there was a very real possibility you wouldn't walk away from it, hijacking became virtually impossible as every. single. passenger. would now be very much motivated to fight in order to prevent a certain death. United 93 already made this clear: they found out about what happened to the other planes, so they tried taking back the airplane. They didn't get it back, but the terrorist attack itself definitely failed.
Even without any kind of TSA future hijackings would almost certainly be closer to United 93, as American Airlines Flight 63 showed in practice.
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> which are the ones that drove plane hijackings to near-zero? How many plane hijackings have occurred in other countries, which don't have the TSA?
Every country in the world responded to 9/11 with enhanced airport security. After the end of "shoes off" last year, I don't think the US is stricter in any meaningful way than the global norm.