Don’t get me wrong, it should be illegal to do a preemptive nuclear strike, it just sadly isn’t.

It might not be feasible for the entire chain to have the information needed to make that call, but there is definitely someone in military authority positioned to know if it’s defensive or offensive, and that person should be both allowed and obligated to refuse the order if it’s an offensive strike.

Morality and the law may not be equivalent, but it would certainly be more convenient if they were closer.

Upfront: it should be obvious that no sane person wants us to drop a nuke or thinks there’s any connotation of “okay” to any aspect of it.

Why do you think it would be an illegal order? There are very clear rules on what makes an order legal or not and, horribly, attacking a nation that poses no real threat isn’t on the list. What nations we attack is a policy matter, and the rules are very clear that the military doesn’t get a say in policy.
Explicitly targeting civilians for a strike on a city is where the line would be. Targeting something else in the city and deciding the civilians are acceptable collateral damage is right on the line. Legally, it’s entirely unambiguously evil morally.

There are checks that keep the president from unilaterally launching a nuke. Unfortunately, the intent of those is to ensure the president is legally competent and actually the president, not to ensure he’s wise or rational.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Hering

The system has been explicitly designed to minimize the risk of conscience preventing a launch. Issue training orders where the firing crews have no idea if it’s real or not. Keep them on two week rotations where they don’t have access to the outside world so they wouldn’t know. Specifically select for people who will follow the order because it’s validcand legal, without considering the greater context. People who are legitimately confused but ultimately unconcerned with protests against them specifically doing what they do, including clergy from their own religion. (Actual story of an ICBM operators reaction to nuns protesting and attempting to block access to the missile site he was stationed at)

There is no doubt in my mind that if the order were given and the VP and cabinet didn’t remove him, that the order would be followed.

This is entirely it. A corporation can’t care about people, but the people in the corporation can.

Business interests have forced a lot of companies to avoid doing things that would offend the right, lest they pull government contracts for appearing to support people.
The people in the businesses who give a shit aren’t going to expend energy defending something that ultimately doesn’t matter, like the logo being rainbow colored.

The company I work for is one of the ones that didn’t change it’s logo, and it was explicitly communicated to be because it would risk stupid amounts of money from government contracts.

More efforts were put into things that actually matter. Instead of eliminating DEI, it was relabeled EEOC compliance and left unchanged, without much fanfare. (“Jen is transitioning from head of our DEI office to leading our office of EEOC compliance. Her responsibilities and reports remain the same”). Our benefits were quietly extended to cover a few more cases for relocation assistance to “cover new sources of employee relocation interest”. Travel expenses related to reproductive healthcare became covered by the health plan, as well as for gender identity related care.

The company is a heartless profit seeking beast. The people in them have the ability to find a way to do the right thing while appeasing the beast, but it takes effort to push for things so they just don’t push for the symbolic gestures.

It’s shitty, and I have to imagine that it kinda stings to have token support deemed non-viable, but the world is also shit right now. :(

Multiple people is significantly more force than even a knife.

Proportional force means the force must be proportional to the threat, not to the force the other person is using. If someone threatens death with their hands, you can use deadly force to defend against a deadly threat.

One would be reasonable in concluding that masked people trying to force you or someone else into a van is an imminent threat of death, great bodily harm or sexual assault.

You can’t use deadly force to defend against harassment, or theft because that’s disproportionate.

Well, there actually wouldn’t be a much larger explosion, that’s just not how nukes work.
A nuclear explosion is an incredibly delicate process, and the material just won’t go critical because there’s another detonation nearby. It’s not like dropping a bomb on a dynamite warehouse. There’s not a great analogy for what it is like though. Expecting a satellite launch to happen because you blew up a tank of rocket fuel next to it? Not quite there.

Additional contamination from onsite material is a different matter. Most nukes detonate above their target since that maximizes damage, but it also reduces fallout. There would, however, be vaporized material that would be sucked into the air by the vacuum created by the detonation. It’s not clear if the presence of radioactive material would make it significantly worse than the general “radioactive dust and molten sand” that would normally be sent into the air.

In general, if you nuke something there’s going to be radioactive issues afterwards, and you shouldn’t do it. Adding a nuclear facility to the mix is kinda just throwing rocks at the windows on 9/11.

unlike Democrat and Republican voters have morals and will not tolerate genocide no matter how hard they fearmonger.

And yet their principled opposition not only did nothing, it’s very clearly made things worse for basically everyone. The genocide didn’t stop, but now there’s not even token opposition. Iran is being bombed. Civil rights are being rolled back across the country, food aid is being taken from millions, and it’s just starting.

The Democrats were never “doing genocide”, just like the Republicans aren’t now. The Democrats weren’t saying they would do enough to stop someone else from doing it, and the Republicans were saying they would encourage them to do it harder.

Red MAGA … Blue MAGA…Democratic party is a bigger cult than Republicans

Congratulations on being an unwitting mouthpiece for the RNC. "Maga is just a rude word to call someone! It’s not literally what we have on our hats!” "staunch opposition to fascism is closed minded and just as prejudicial as wanting to eliminate trans people!”

I hope your movement does stop Trump and cause effective change and reform. I’m not holding my breath, because I don’t think they were counting on your votes in the first place and the next time they think about you will be when they want you to be mad at the Democrats again to keep you from voting for them.

And then Jill Stein won, and the genocide stopped, right?

Like I said, I don’t question the intention or code of ethics for the people involved, but there’s a reason they and people like them get a lot of support from the RNC.
They aren’t voters who are realistically going to vote Republican, so the best they can do is be diverted to a spoiler candidate.

Thinking that that translates to political leverage against the Republicans is just naive though. They didn’t vote for them in the first place, so it’s an empty threat.

The people who might opt to not vote for Biden or Harris aren’t people who would have voted for trump in the first place, so I don’t see them having a lot of leverage.

I can’t tell you what code to follow, but the whole thing reeks of people who didn’t get the memo that trump doesn’t need them to bleed votes from the Dems anymore.

It’s likely phrased in the law as closer to while serving on a swat team, as in they’re actively wearing a ballistic face shield and gas mask for legitimate reasons.

It’s a prime opportunity for things to get lost in translation between the law, the person talking to the press, and the report.

Yes, I understand what you’re saying, it’s not a complicated position.
Your position is that national reputation matters more than anything else. And most pointedly, the national reputation of your allies matters more than any other argument.

What I’m saying is, is that the actions the US, or any other nation, took before the people currently running things were even born have no bearing on current events. Nations aren’t people, and they don’t possess a national character that you can use to try to predict their behavior or judge them.

Would the world be justified in concluding that it’s only a matter of time before Germany does some more genocide? Before Japan unleashes atrocities across Asia?

If you’re getting down to it, the US can’t control other nations, beyond stick and carrot means. And the US has the same right to try to keep Iran from getting nukes as Iran does in trying to get them. Because again, nations aren’t people. They don’t have rights, they have capabilities.

And all of that’s irrelevant! Because the question is, is Israel justified in attacking Iran? The perception of hypocrisy in US foreign policy isn’t relevant to that question.

No, what I don’t understand is what relevance that has to this situation. The US using nukes on Japan 80 years ago doesn’t make Iran making nukes justified. It doesn’t validate Iran not having nukes. It neither strengthens nor weakens Israeli claims of an Iranian weapons program, and it doesn’t make a preemptive strike to purportedly disable them just or unjust.

It seems like you’re arguing that the US nuked Japan and therefore Iran, a signatory to the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, is allowed to have nukes. Israel is falsely characterizing their civilian energy program, and we know this because of their backing by the US.
It’s just a non-sequitor, particularly when there’s relevant reasons why US involvement complicated matters. .

What does that even mean? How is what a nation did generations ago relevant to two different nations in a totally different scenario?

The USs actions in world war two are an odd thing to bring up in this context. It was a radically different set of circumstances, 80 years ago, and none of the people involved are alive anymore.
It’s entirely irrelevant.

May as well point out that the US was the driver for the creation of those watchdog groups and is a leading force in nuclear disarmament. It’s just as relevant to if Iran has a nuclear weapons program or Israels justification for attacking.

Iranian opposition to US strategic interests in the region giving the US a strong motivation to let anything that makes them weaker happen is a perfectly good thing to mention.

We stopped maintaining a handful of them, but waay later than you would expect. At some point we decided we didn’t need a plan to deal with an invasion by the British empire kept up to date at all times.

They haven’t been ordered to do something patently illegal as of yet.
Disobeying an order can carry a sharp penalty for soldiers and it’s frankly not worth the risk when the dubious order is to guard a federal building from people who pose no threat.

You want the military to strongly resist illegal orders, but having the military decide policy is a dangerous line to cross.

Fundamentally, I agree with you.

The page being referenced

Because the phrase “Wikipedians discussed ways that AI…” Is ambiguous I tracked down the page being referenced. It could mean they gathered with the intent to discuss that topic, or they discussed it as a result of considering the problem.

The page gives me the impression that it’s not quite “we’re gonna use AI, figure it out”, but more that some people put together a presentation on how they felt AI could be used to address a broad problem, and then they workshopped more focused ways to use it towards that broad target.

It would have been better if they had started with an actual concrete problem, brainstormed solutions, and then gone with one that fit, but they were at least starting with a problem domain that they thought it was a applicable to.

Personally, the problems I’ve run into on Wikipedia are largely low traffic topics where the content is too much like someone copied a textbook into the page, or just awkward grammar and confusing sentences.
This article quickly makes it clear that someone didn’t write it in an encyclopedia style from scratch.

A page detailing the the AI-generated summaries project, called “Simple Article Summaries,” explains that it was proposed after a discussion at Wikimedia’s 2024 conference, Wikimania, where “Wikimedians discussed ways that AI/machine-generated remixing of the already created content can be used to make Wikipedia more accessible and easier to learn from.” Editors who participated in the discussion thought that these summaries could improve the learning experience on Wikipedia, where some article summaries can be quite dense and filled with technical jargon, but that AI features needed to be cleared labeled as such and that users needed an easy to way to flag issues with “machine-generated/remixed content once it was published or generated automatically.”

The intent was to make more uniform summaries, since some of them can still be inscrutable.
Relying on a tool notorious for making significant errors isn’t the right way to do it, but it’s a real issue being examined.

In thermochemistry, an exothermic reaction is a “reaction for which the overall standard enthalpy change ΔH⚬ is negative.”[1][2] Exothermic reactions usually release heat. The term is often confused with exergonic reaction, which IUPAC defines as “… a reaction for which the overall standard Gibbs energy change ΔG⚬ is negative.”[2] A strongly exothermic reaction will usually also be exergonic because ΔH⚬ makes a major contribution to ΔG⚬. Most of the spectacular chemical reactions that are demonstrated in classrooms are exothermic and exergonic. The opposite is an endothermic reaction, which usually takes up heat and is driven by an entropy increase in the system.

This is a perfectly accurate summary, but it’s not entirely clear and has room for improvement.

I’m guessing they were adding new summaries so that they could clearly label them and not remove the existing ones, not out of a desire to add even more summaries.

When your argument consistently lines up with the actual fascists, people might mistake you for one when you give no other context. (Consistently arguing that it’s protestors causing violence is literally the argument being used to justify violence). Doubly so when you respond to the hint that left protest organizers try to keep violence in check, so it’s notable when it does happen with a “why do you think protest violence is impossible?”.
Makes you sound like a bootlicker toeing the line.

If your point is just that agent provocateurs are not in the same vein as little green men then we are in agreement.

After saying over and over, you seem to have finally gotten it! Congratulations!

You vastly overestimate how much effort it takes to “wear jeans and a t shirt, go over there and throw stuff”.

Up until now you haven’t mentioned anything about any myths you’re combating, so… You kinda just came across as someone standing up for the noble police who would never stoop to trickery to find an excuse for violence.
When your argument consistently lines up with the actual fascists, people might mistake you for one when you give no other context. (Consistently arguing that it’s protestors causing violence is literally the argument being used to justify violence). Doubly so when you respond to the hint that left protest organizers try to keep violence in check, so it’s notable when it does happen with a “why do you think protest violence is impossible?”.
Makes you sound like a bootlicker toeing the line.

My argument is…

I don’t care. Basically everything else you wrote is arguing against something I never said or implied.

Do you believe that during a protest, individual agency no longer exists?

Do you believe that using strong language and massively over exaggerating the slightest wrong interpretation of what someone said, or what you’d rather they had said, makes you the literal second coming of rhetorical Jesus?

while it’s probably not the case that it’s overwhelmingly likely to be an agent provocateur, it would be unsurprising if it were that, someone there to push for escalation with no police affiliation, or just petty hooliganism.

You called the existence of agitators a conspiracy theory. They’re not, which was the point of my comment.

It’s not a conspiracy theory to think that someone causing trouble came to the protest solely to cause trouble, for whom or why not withstanding.

I believe this is the third or fourth time I’ve clearly stated my point, so I’m going to start copying from previous comments to save you the trouble of scrolling.

In the context, conspiracy theory seemed the more likely meaning, since being pedantic about the word would mean most of the people there engaging in violence would be conspirators regardless of why they were there.
Asking incredulously if someone really thinks the police are more likely to conspire to violence than people there under guise of peaceful protest is a level of naivete that I didn’t assume.
But you are correct, I didn’t interpret your words strictly literally, and assumed you didn’t know about agitators rather than reading your comment as the naive defense of police it otherwise appeared to be.