Violence (or the threat of it) is the only means of influence that the people have ever had. As you’ve correctly identified, when other avenues of enacting their will are stymied, violence results, but that threat of violence must be what sits behind every vote, or the vote would have no power.

To put it succinctly, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

My ideological opponents are already silencing speech. I gain nothing by ceding that tool solely to them.

As long as fascists exist they must be silenced. When they seize power, they will not do you the courtesy of allowing you to speak just because you let them. It’s naive to think otherwise.

Censorship of speech is a powerful tool. Why, if you have the true conviction of your beliefs, would you fight with one hand behind your back?

Moreover, I’ve seen no evidence in my lifetime that letting my ideological opponents speak leads to positive results.

Seems kind of instructive to me that just putting a Mario coat of paint on a stripped-down Forza Horizon makes the reviewers go wild.

What solution is AI going to come up with other than “stop burning fossil fuels”? We already know the solution to climate change. Acting like we don’t is absurd.

I think a good first step in meeting climate goals would be eating Eric Schmidt.

Excuse the overdramatization, but it feels a lot like Frodo going to the Grey Havens. They did something great and now their reward is to disappear forever and be well taken care of.

When asked if he was sure that Albion couldn’t be copyrighted due to its historical context, he replied: “I don’t know if I’m honest, I don’t really know… I hope so. I mean you would think that the responsible person I should be, I would’ve spent the last six months in lawyers’ offices…”

Bold strategy, Cotton.

I had to look it up. It was called Guardian of Atlas and Sean left the company right after the beta launched and then the game got cancelled. My guess as to why it went poorly is just that it was inexperienced devs making a game at a time when SC2 was still actually relatively popular. There was no space in the already tiny genre of RTS.

Now that Blizzard has essentially abandoned StarCraft, it might be possible for some folks to carve some of that tiny market away.

Day9 did consult on the design of an RTS like ten years ago and it didn’t amount to anything.

The issue, to be clear, is not who makes the surveillance cameras. It’s the surveillance cameras being installed in the first place.

Alarmism about Chinese surveillance cameras is missing the forest for the trees.

If you have an older coin-op washer in your building you can usually look up the model number and either buy a master key or learn the default programming code to set the price.

For context: In the US, CBP can search your phone without a warrant if you live within 100 miles of a border or coast (2/3rds of the population).

The researchers conclude that the EU should use its strong bargaining power due to the single market to induce the Chinese government to abandon the most harmful subsidies.

This is their advice? Make the technology for the green transition more expensive rather than enact your own subsidies?

Capitalists are going to burn this planet.

We won’t be abandoning the tropics. The people who live there will be. And, based on current prevailing attitudes of temperate democracies, those fleeing the uninhabitable zones will be told to simply pound sand. It will be genocide by omission.

The democracy I live under now keeps ignoring or delaying action on climate change in favor of things that are less important than the comfortable survival of our species. If it’s trying to convince me it’s worth saving it’s doing a bad job.

My ideological concerns are secondary to my ecological concerns.

China’s solar panel industry isn’t a monopoly, much like their auto industry.

The internal competition is part of the reason both are so cheap.

I’m asking you what you think would be different if China was the largest global superpower?

If this is some great fear we’re all supposed to have to the point that we’ll forestall making progress on decarbonizing then it should be easy to clearly articulate what we’re afraid of happening.

What’s there to defend? We need more solar panels. The cheaper they are the better.

See above where I said I do not give a shit about how many jobs are preserved on my rapidly warming planet.