and it will soon guard year-round Artic sea lanes. With enough warming it may become attractive for farming and living space.

Sure Greenland is going to be prime real estate due to climate change, but people like Miller are going to be long dead by then. And I don’t think this crew in charge of the white house are so altruistic and concerned for the future of America that they want to secure resources for a century or two down the road.

Besides, we have much bigger concerns if Greenland melts than if we have land to settle.

It’s far more likely some kind of Russia-connected plot for strategic positioning.

Total BS.

His arms aren’t possibly strong enough to strangle a baby.

I’m very glad to hear that you’re taking the right steps to working something out with your partner.

I guess if I were to pass on any measure of aged wisdom on the issue, it would be that having an emotional/reactionary state of mind is not entirely bad. If you’re a logical thinker who defaults to reason first before reacting to an emotion, that will serve you well in life making decisions and figuring out problems, but it’s not necessarily “better” than being someone emotional.

Just like an emotional/reactionary person needs to learn that their system isn’t the only valid way to deal with the world, a logical minded person isn’t necessarily having a “better” experience in life. We are all deeply emotional creatures and trying to squash that can be just as damaging as letting our feelings run away with us and falling down some conspiracy hole. A feeling person has more potential for healthier emotions and emotional intelligence than someone who just sticks to systems and “policy” about life.

Making this concession is key to reaching out and bridging that gap. We all have things to work on in ourselves, the key to good relationships is deciding together, as a team, what traits or values you’re going to share and what you need to work on improving, and acceptance that you’re never going to “get there” and be the best version of yourself, you can only keep trying for someone who you decide is worth it, and hopefully that person will share that same perspective.

Oh the ISS is definitely bigger than anything ever sent to space, as I would expect from an international project that was built by a coalition of countries in better days, but it doesn’t really compare to China’s long-term goals and plans that have been on schedule. China is absolutely dominating space right now and will be into the future unless the US just suddenly gets it shit together and elects people who care about science and exploration, and even then it will take many years or decades now to undo the damage that trumpism has done to the US’s global leadership in space science.

The ISS is going to be deorbited in 2031, and I am not expecting a bigger, newer project to replace it. At this point I am not expecting to have access to health care broadly in 2031 in the US.

The current monster they have completed in 2022, Tiangong, was the third in a series of stations, the previous Tiangong-1 and Tiangong-2 stations were mostly meant to test technique and technology but were remarkable achievements in their own right. They currently have the largest and most active space program in the world. I didn’t even touch on their lunar program, their heavy satellite capability and their list of recent and upcoming solar-system probes.

I know that building community is not only an answer to violence, but broadly speaking the answer to a lot of social problems. I am curious though if you’re referencing a source or study, if the neighborhood beautification projects lead to people becoming more involved in their communities, or if it’s communities already coming together to beautify their neighborhoods.

My parents were also people whom I would make great efforts to explain things to them with reason and logic and they would understand it and act logical when presented with logical arguments, but the moment an emotion rose up in them again it would all go out the window.

Some people can’t deal with emotions, they never worked out the basic concept that emotions are not the same as factual reality, they just respond to a feeling and let their brains write whatever story fits immediately to explain and validate those feelings, even if the story doesn’t make sense. The only way you can get people like that to stay aligned on a particular idea is to present them a constant narrative that provokes their emotions.

Unfortunately, this is a known technique now for capturing large segments of the population. Fear and anger are much stronger emotions than any others so as long as you can keep people scared or paranoid or angry at some other group, you can tell them anything and they won’t bother trying to reason it out.

This is absolutely right and a good point that I think a lot of people really don’t get. China isn’t filled with the cheap shit we get from China, they have a thriving middle-class, they have luxury goods the likes of which westerners haven’t dreamed of. They have quality standards for goods and services probably higher than most places.

It’s just that since we get their cheap dollar-store merch and we read stories about traditional Chinese medicine, we get the picture here that they’re still largely a backwards, “3rd-world” nation of rice farmers and peasants. It would be like judging the entire US on a sampling of people from the mountains of Appalachia.

Related, but I also find it hilarious when people reference China as “communist” in any capacity.

Yep. There is no government that actually serves the people, governments serve self-preservation and they tend to do heinous shit to succeed at that. We are not an evolved species but really only because we lack the will to be better broadly.

As individuals we each have vast capacity for learning, caring and understanding the world around us. As a generalized population we are a liquid that flows to the lowest point and erodes everything it touches.

Media is just bought and controlled by the corporate donor class who have installed this administration to begin with. Every major outlet is compromised.

Every time you see media making the administration angry or they have spats, it’s just performance. I think if everyone realized how much of what we are experiencing is kayfabe people would have a mental breakdown.

It’s important to point out balancing factors when discussing the accomplishments of any entity or state.

China is doing amazing things and will likely dominate the coming century, but that doesn’t mean we should look at them like heroes or champions, and we need to hold our leaders accountable for wrongs.

It’s possible they will get better as they take on more of a global role in the absence of the US hegemony that will likely start to crumble over the next several decades. I hope they give their people more rights and become leaders of world stability, but part of why they’re escaping the destabilizing forces that are crushing democratic countries is precisely because they have such an oppressive stranglehold on their own culture. It’s a complex situation.

No that’s just freedom, freedoming places that needed to be freedomed. Oohrah.

Okay but what metric should we use for the average American median voter who just wants to see China enter a wrestling ring with pyrotechnics and then rock and roll music plays and we see the US hit them with a steel chair.

Even that might be too nuanced and complex for the average American voter.

China is an authoritarian dictatorship that tramples human rights and treats its citizens like resources and speed-bumps and treats “free speech” as the joke it actually is.

All that said, they are pulling ahead on the world stage by miles. We don’t see it in the US because again… freedom of speech isn’t real, media is filtered, but if you travel you see whole other angles on the entire planet and just how much we don’t get shown.

For example, you rarely see news about it, but China has launched 3 space stations in the time it took us to make just the documentaries about the ISS and how huuuuge of an accomplishment it was for the world. They are going to be launching probes and setting up smart, realistic goals for exploring the solar system. That’s just not the kind high-tech, ambitious, modern project that we associate with our stereotypical imagery of China that we get fed here, but if you actually walk around in any of their new cities you will feel a distinct, sinking sensation that we’ve already lost.

It depends a lot on your local laws. Not every state even makes the distinction, so to err on the side of caution, I always treated ammo the same as a gun, and never separated them.

Some laws let you transport guns anywhere in your car if it’s in a locked box, some laws are written in a way where that could mean your glove compartment, other states have wording that excludes a glove compartment, just as an example of the ambiguity involved in gun laws.

Also, your proximity to schools or other public services can override all the other laws. It was when I was drawing kilometer radiuses from local schools that I started to feel such stress from planning my trips outside that I decided to stop taking the damn thing out all the time, and eventually just stopped entirely.

A good CCW class will give you the most basic stuff you need to know for your area, but it does change frequently so you would need to refresh on the laws frequently.

USA Nukes Poland

“The president took another eyebrow-raising strategy today, let’s talk to a panel of assorted youtube streamers to analyze what he meant with this action…”

I did self-defense training, both learning and teaching for close to 15 years or so, I did the CCW thing, took classes in firearms as well as martial arts and the whole nine-yards for many years.

I will often reiterate what you cited there, that if you’re in a dangerous situation that you already expect to be dangerous, your first priority is changing your situation. Not going to that place, working towards moving, etc. Kind of like step-one of any fight is to not get into a fight.

I eventually also stopped carrying my gun, because all it did was add extra stress to my life. Always making sure you know where it is, if you’re somewhere that legally prohibits you having it, then if you do have to leave it outside of a store or business, you are always thinking about it inside your car. My greatest worry was someone breaking into my vehicle and using the gun to commit a crime, which statistically is much, much more likely than actually being in a situation where you need to use it.

I still own guns but keep them locked up. But I don’t enjoy guns broadly because I’ve had too much time think about it. I’ve had to learn the law, I’ve had to take responsibility for teaching others how to defend themselves, I’ve spent too much time playing out situations and the post-event situations that most gun-chuds NEVER spend a moment thinking about.

I feel strongly now that a lot of the gun violence in the US can be connected to the general lack of respect and knowledge about firearms. The only “training” most owners get is action movies. I think if more people were required to actually study the law and play out scenarios they might be far less likely to reach for a gun to solve all their problems.

The more you think about it, the less sense it makes.

If you actually read the book, it makes so little sense you will weep for humanity.

You can pay your way to get whatever you want. Any rules or regulations are just speed-bumps to the wealthy.

Honestly, at this point, it’s fine. Let them all all crowd that death mountain and die in herds, and in another 50 million years AI/alien archeologists studying the Himalayan meadows will dig down and find a layer of oxygen-tank iron and fossilized rich-people remains.

Raise the price to ONE MILLION DOLLARS, and then just have sherpas empty out the air tanks of everyone who goes there. We’ll have wealth inequality stamped out in a couple years.