Germany tried to create laws to prevent a repeat of the Holocaust. It’s a laudable effort but they’re failing at it.

The problem is that they were so specific about preventing “The Holocaust” that they ignored many other kinds of bigotry and racism. They thought that if they forbid a few key phrases and symbols, hatred would wither on the vine. Instead they just cleared the way for other aspects of racism to flourish.

I sure as hell wouldn’t want the job of securing logistics in the northern woods with a bunch of angry Canucks running around.

This guy seems like he might know what he’s talking about but is there a version that isn’t a 3 hour video?

Like an article or something?

talk to their parents first

This is key. It’s one thing to stop a child from harassing your pet. If you “teach them a lesson” after the fact without the parents’ permission, there are now two wrongs that need to be dealt with.

They do work. They’ve been using them to blow up tanks.

The way they’re used there isn’t much time for that. With regular drones they hunt around for something to kill and then dive in. The wired drones stay hidden until the target comes into range and then they just come out for the strike. The defenders only have a few seconds to react.

Wire guided missiles have been in use since WWII.

Markus Reisner has a pretty good explanation of how they’re deployed in one of his videos.

They have much shorter range so they basically set them up as ambushes. The wired drone gets hidden somewhere at a choke point. An other operator flies a recon drone at long range. When they report that a good target has come into range the wired drone takes off and hits the target.

Ikea really managed to pull off a magnificent marketing stunt.

They have the same furniture quality that you can get off of Amazon, Wayfair, or Walmart but you have to go get it out of their warehouse and deal with the logistics of getting it to your house. But they hand out some meatballs and give everything funky Swedish names; so people get the impression that it’s a fancy European experience.

China is the single largest manufacturer of Ikea products. I found that when I went directly to the source, I could get the same item cheaper or a better item at the same price. That deal is likely to die with the new tariff regime but that same regime will have similar impacts on Ikea.

They gave up their bicycles and quaint straw hats for modernity and now they think they’re entitled to the same standard of living as Americans.

Don’t care

It’s easy to ignore the suffering of others. Have you spent any time in villages where the richest people live like medieval peasants because the whole town hasn’t had any infrastructure improvements in over a century? “Rich” in those places just means slightly less desperately poor. They’re quite egalitarian, it’s just that they’re all broke together.

I’ve never heard of Siemens referred to as an “automation company”.

That’s technically true but they’re much more into heavy industry. They build power plants, trains, ports and industrial automation equipment. They’ve had to lay off some of their own employees but I’m not aware of any cases of their business putting other people out of work.

No shame.

I view it as a friendly competition between Europeans. Right now, Spain is in the lead. UK and Italy are trailing but they’re still racing in the right direction. I’m cheering for them to catch up.

Is absurd that we essentially have a regressive income tax. I also wouldn’t ignore the global environment during that period.

During those decades, the US was effectively the only industrialized nation in the world. Everyone else either never had factories to begin with, or had smoldering piles of rubble where their factories used to be.

The major difference is that in “blink” and “chicken” you expect to keep doing your thing (eg driving straight ahead) while only your opponent makes concessions.

The Cuban missile crisis involved significant concessions on both sides.

The Cuban middle crisis was resolved through negotiation and concessions, not by a game of nuclear chicken.

Exactly. The real debate is on which parts should be off limits.

Most people can think of some speech that they consider so horrible that nobody should be allowed to say it.

People often try to hedge that position by arguing that they’re not even really infringing on anyone’s speech because their form of restriction doesn’t meet a sufficient threshold of censorship.

Does anyone?

The closest I can think of to “real free speech absolutists” is the old-school doctrinal libertarians. Even they have limits on what they believe should be allowed and specifically state that contracts should be legally enforceable.

As a joke, I once asked an LLM to produce a review of Top Gun that argued that it was actually a trans allegory. It made terrible arguments but it did produce words that technically met that requirement. (It included some kind of hilarious lines about the satirical use of hypermasculinity)

I imagine an argument that “Amerika is a love song” would look similar.

Rammstein released “Amerika” in 2004. That was during the 1st Bush Jr administration but the complaints in the song aren’t limited to Republicans.

We could keep going; pankration, hoplidromos…

There’s a whole section of the Aeneid that talks about their impromptu sporting matches (the description of the boxing gauntlets is particularly spicy).

“Romance of the Three Kingdoms” has multiple instances where generals arrange for games among their troops.