Came here to post this and say “finally”, but someone had already noticed. :)
There’s a quote that’s probably not from Churchill, but is frequently mis-attributed to him (the actual source is probably Abba Evan, an Israeli diplomat visiting Japan). The distorted quote says something that’s appropriate today:
“You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all other possibilities.”
To resist an organized group, you communicate the problem (in an anarchist society, communicating the problem of a nascent state seems like the easy part), present evidence of the nature and severity of the problem, and ask people and existing organizations to mobilize.
Whether the next step is obstructing the state peacefully or mass production of munitions, would already depend on how bad the state has got.
The same that stops them from taking over a democracy. Sometimes.
If a society became anarchist enough to abolish state structures, there obviously had to exist a reason - there had to exist popular support.
Thus, someone attempting to recreate a state would face questions and opposition. People would try to persuade them of their error. If they declared a state, anarchists would not recognize it. If it claimed sovereignity above a territory, anarchists might not recognize that either.
The new state might encounter problems - unwilling residents would leave and be accepted in anarchy, annoyed anarchists would organize trade boycotts and sanctions, ultimately it could go badly and armed confrontation could follow. In some scenarios, the state might remain and attract people who want to live there. In some scenarios, war would follow - and if the majority really was anarchist, the state would lose and disappear.
Also notably, the Kronstadt anarchists held a general assembly to dicsuss the question of “shall we accept Lenin’s ultimatum, or fight a battle against the Red Army?” and decided democratically to fight.
(The battle was extremely bloody, anarchists lost and the Red Army won, at the cost of losing at least 5 times more people. Considerable numbers of anarchists escaped to Finland.)
In short: anarchists can use heavy artillery when needed, even if they know that war is not healthy - neither for them or the society they want.
YPG, the militia formed during the seperation of Rojava from the Syrian government, have been accused by Human Rights groups of using Child Soldiers.
Correct… and notably, unlike the other forces around them (Syrian dictatorship, Turkish-sponsored islamists, ISIS, etc) they responded to the accusation within a month:
In June 2020, United Nations reported the YPG/YPJ as the largest faction in the Syrian civil war by the number of recruited child soldiers with 283 child soldiers followed by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham with 245 child soldiers.[141]
On 15 July 2020, SDF issued a new military order prohibiting child recruitment. The NGO Fight For Humanity conducted multiple training sessions with hundreds of SDF commanders about the UN-SDF Action Plan To Prevent Child Recruitment, and distributed informational posters and flyers about it written in both Arabic and Kurdish, as part of an ongoing educational process. Syria-based researcher Thomas McClure observed that “SDF are less likely to engage in such practices than any of the other forces in Syria, but seek to hold themselves to a higher standard of accountability and human rights.”[142]
On 29 August 2020, SDF announced the creation of a new system that anyone can use to confidentially report to specialized Child Protection offices any suspected case of child recruitment, in accordance with the action plan that the SDF signed with the United Nations in the summer of 2019.[143][144]
Having once worked on an open source project that dealt with providing anonymity - it was considered the duty of the release engineer to have an overview of all code committed (and to ask questions, publicly if needed, if they had any doubts) - before compiling and signing the code.
On some months, that was a big load of work and it seemed possible that one person might miss something. So others were encouraged to read and report about irregularities too. I don’t think anyone ever skipped it, because the implications were clear: “if one of us fails, someone somewhere can get imprisoned or killed, not to speak of milder results”.
However, in case of an utility not directly involved with functions that are critical for security - it might be easier to pass through the sieve.
Smash anything but a windshield. I’ve needed to violently remove a windshield when replacing it (time was running out and tool shops were closed). Wearing protective glasses and pushing with both legs is what it took to somewhat loosen it, but not immediately remove it. Windshields are a multilayer structure of plastic and glass. Side windows are just glass.
True, but there’s some more.
Over here, ice roads are opened on typical winters on several smaller bays. The instruction to drivers is:
Typically, if a car sinks on an ice road, people are likely to get out. A crank-operated window is handy in such a case. But regardless of instruction, sometimes folks do die. :(
In general, I would not like to experience any sort of extreme incident in an over-engineered car. I’d prefer something from the 1970-ties, but with airbags.
Say you’re trying to defend against something like a Shahed-136. It can hit pretty much anywhere in Ukraine. You can’t stick an AA gun on everything that Russia might consider trading a Shahed-136 for.
As far as I know, the routine in the current war is - the AA gun is on a truck that moves 80 km/h, the drone comes in slower than 300 km/h, one or multiple truck crews position themselves on likely vantage points for intercepting, and the rest is luck.
Both of you are right.
It’s difficult, but how difficult depends on the task you set. If the task is “maintain manually initiated target lock on a clearly defined object on an empty field, despite the communications link breaking for 10 seconds” -> it is “give a team of coders half a year” difficult. It’s been solved before, the solution just needs re-inventing and porting to a different platform.
If it’s “identify whether an object is military, whether it is frienly or hostile, consider if it’s worth attacking, and attack a camouflaged target in a dense forest”, then it’s currently not worth trying.
No conclusive proof. It didn’t have a passthrough for one electrode of the two. It did have remains of acid inside and corrosion on the electrodes. One can speculate whether it was an experimental device, a faulty device or something else entirely (one alchemist trying to replicate another’s secrets and doing it wrong?).
To add insult to the injury, it was lost or stolen during the war in 2003, so more analysis can’t be done until it gets re-discovered. :o
No problem, just tell them to ask from Baghdad, they should know where it is. :) A jug of wine or vinegar, one electrode of iron, another made of copper, voila… the Baghdad battery.
If they overcome / disable ad blocking, they will lose browser market share - and people don’t design websites for marginal browsers with exotic features.
I’m convinced 99% people posting that same blog post that sells opinions as facts, haven’t actually lived through it.
I’m a person who lost contact with people on Facebook while using Pidgin. This unfortunate development in ancient history actually forced me to briefly register on Facebook to maintain contact - because they couldn’t be convinced to adopt Pidgin and Pidgin users were a minority (as were users of other XMPP messenger apps, at least separately counted).
Prognosis: Facebook will play along to gain mass, then go incompatible. They will do this at a moment when they think users will gravitate towards their side of the fence.
Advise: never open that door, there be dragons on the other side.
We should remember what they have already done, and expect more of the same, because they haven’t changed. Justified grudges are perfectly fine to hold. A corporation that has harmed society by supporting polarization in many countries (formation of echo chambers, targeted advertising) should be boycotted in retribution.
Remembering what Facebook did with XMPP (initially allowed their users to speak to other messengers’ users, then got sloppy with compatibility, causing great workload to unrelated app developers, and finally, having accumulated enough mass for Messenger, stopped supporting XMPP) - Facebook should be avoided like fire.
Facebook is also bad for society, allowing manipulation (targeted advertizing), aggregating great amounts of user data (harming privacy) and prioritizing user engagement regardless of the social cost (a hateful conflict generates more clicks than cat photos).
/me listening to the sound of a WinXP virtual machine booting under Debian Linux
They can shoot their foot with a grenade launcher next. I’m already out of range.