They wanted to impede the soft power of China in the region. It does make sense in a realpolitik kind of way, but someone with a fucking conscience in the command chain should have stopped this.

The only thing Bethesda is motivated to do, frothing, absolutely chomping at the bit, is figure out a way to successfully monetize modded content.

No, they absolutely used it as a ground-attack incendiary and have admitted as such. They were not flushed out by being illuminated, they were flushed out with choking smoke and burning shit raining down on their positions.

Even if they did only use illumination flares, there are considerations against using them in civilian areas in ways that can start fires or otherwise cause injury to civilians.

The legal issue is moot because the US was not an adherent to these laws until 2009.

The US used the same weapons in Fallujah and likely elsewhere. They called it “shake and bake” when they first fired WP artillery to draw enemy fighters out, then followed up with conventional artillery to kill them.

Nobody can hold the US accountable, so they’re not going to hold their rabid dog accountable either.

And naturally it’s a reverse-engineered BD Spot, likely even down to the software. Why put money into R&D when your adversaries do it for you?

A lot of the pilgrims were the fundamentalist crazies that Europe didn’t want, and the towns they founded had laws like this and more.

To me, the wording of the Israeli statement implies it was them, though of course it’s not 100% certain. If they had even the flimsiest proof to pin it on Hamas they would go public with it immediately.

A solar storm of that scale wouldn’t just take down Facebook and Twitter for a while, it could destroy critical power infrastructure around the globe that would take months to repair. People would die.

Last I knew they called the Russia-Ukraine war the “NATO War in Ukraine” and claimed Russia killed over 10,000 “NATO mercenaries” mostly from Germany.

Didn’t the Serbian legislative body fucking gas themselves with CS a few years back?

They need to get people to believe that the security theater is working to protect them (it doesn’t), otherwise they might start to question why it’s there in the first place. Hint: it’s not to protect the public from terrorists.

That specifically is a valid concern for training ammunition where massive quantities end up being fired into relatively small firing ranges over the years, making the land more or less permanently contaminated with heavy metals and toxic residues from explosives. I doubt ammo for the “real world” will have the same requirements.

Nobody today is selling a 9 year old car for $900 or the inflation equivalent unless it was turned into a cube at the scrap yard.

Cars are on average more expensive today, new or used. Gas is more expensive, and it’s likely more expensive to insure a young driver, which has always been expensive.

If they choose “don’t drive” over “pour much of what little money I have into propping up a falling apart beater,” that’s still a choice. Why rag on them for it?

I agree, but its not something to laugh off. If Roe v wade being canned taught us anything, it is that conservatives are always planning something worse than what they are telling people.

Right fucking here, they are telling people that they are going to criminalize pornography, full stop. That they are going to arrest and jail people even remotely involved in the porn industry, full stop. Imagine what they actually want to do.

“Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.[20]” — “A Promise to America”, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, p. 5, Project 2025