On the other hand, if my workplace was on a list of announced missile targets, I’d stay away.

Assuming that there’s no real chance of their enemy setting up a defense in time:

• It reduces probability of civilian causalities (improves their international image, reduces incentives for affected people to join the fight against them)
• If there is some failure in the attack and the center isn’t disabled, they still reduced productivity. I’d say indefinitely
• Tactic could theoretically be used to threaten or feint. For example, publicly list five target but only bother bombing three, and you get the benefits of scaring away people at the other two without spending weapons. This could also be used to manipulate enemy logistics, like moving their defenses or response teams to one place and then attacking another.

Reflecting on this, I think it’s fair to consider the International Court of Justice (part of the UN) to be a legal system with legitimate jurisdiction over most countries - even if it’s frequently unable to enforce its law. And therefore it’s reasonable to describe a war as “illegal”, wrt the UN.

But I do believe it’s a pointless description - I can’t think of any legal wars, especially if one believes committing war crimes makes even a UN-sanctioned war illegal. I consider it a propagandic description used to put spin on a war. (And just adding that on a personal level, I believe legality is irrelevant to morality and acceptability)

Retaliation is generally understood to be self defence, as a deterrent against further attacks.

While the statement may be true, I want to emphasize that a common tactic is for a country to harass or suppress another country until they retaliate, and claim that retaliation is in fact unprompted aggression which must be retaliated against. While there are notable cases of this in the past decade, this tactic is tried and true across centuries. Therefore, we often see wars where both sides claim self-defense, and both their blocs generally understand their side to be justified.

If this hypothesis is true, and it does sound plausible to me, it would be interesting to see what counter-analysis emerges, or even if citizens try to change their road address from King Street to Landfill Lane to avoid getting whacked.

What the fuck is an “illegal war”? Are there countries out there who give invaders permission to destroy them?

Enron lives on

Honestly, if they offered citizenship and a modest pension, they’d have people lining up to take the centers out.

It seems to me like many have arrived from huge mainstream sites and don’t realize that the fedi is actually pretty big. There are many thousands of us, just look at this community’s stats alone!

When you’ve explored beyond the core of the internet and found websites where there truly are dozens of you, it’s much more calm and communal (or as screentime enthusiasts would call it, slow and ded). I actually was on Lemmy back when there were mere hundreds of us, when many were yearning for the day when reddit would shoot its own foot and bring people here. So I’m very grateful that there aren’t dozens of us! Welcome!

Perhaps its too late for the largest instances, but the idea of a site like this being a spectator activity, about consumption, rather than creating communities. Some smaller instances, and even some larger ones, have an actual unique atmosphere and have larger projects across the instance. When we suddenly got a flood of reddit users escaping from the third-party API fiasco and the Luigi bans, that was huge enough to dilute some of the communities with large amounts of people used to simply voting and commenting, or having a website premade for them.

What’s the actual point of holding someone back from joining your online community if they don’t have enough “points” on their comments or posts?

It is a legitimate anti-abuse tactic. Like you’ve mentioned, there are obvious flaws, but it does help prevent brigadiers, advertisers and other bad actors from easily spinning up throwaways to harass or manipulate a community.

Another way to do this could be account age testing, but this can be defeated by pre-registering empty accounts.

Codeberg works for me. I used to use a couple of indie instances of gitea for various smaller project, but both have either gone down or been at risk, so I mostly use Codeberg which is more organized and failsafe.

That’s it, I’m deleting the internet

Someone posted an image that says “Verify you are human”, with the test being “I stand with Palestine”.

The implication is that those who do not, are not human.

Yes, joking about how Zionist scum (and apathetic people) lack humanity is dehumanization. The image is very literally saying some is not human if they don’t stand with Palestine.

And to recap what I said, this isn’t some moral objection - death to the Zionist Regime and those who empower it. The problem is that dehumanization of humans is an anti-materialist delusion, which has historically led to underestimating enemies.

Oh hey, my anniversary is coming up.

For base daily driver on desk and lap, just a stable standard beginner friendly distro. I’ve customized it a lot, added custom hotkey scripts here and there, but it’s so close to base that a stranger could use it. VMs for anything specialist, a couple of portable USB distros for presentation/demo/one-purpose OS environments, but for the most part I’ve just kept it simple and clean.

It needs to [snip]

Yes, but that’s answering a different question.

When I talk to co-workers about our material conditions, my aim isn’t the immediate implementation of utopia. Our legs aren’t long enough to get there in one step.

I’ll slapfight that, because that’s a waste of time and water.

No, it isn’t standing with Palestine, nor standing against it. It’s simply pointless and a tactical error.

Dehumanizing is a mistake that the Nazis made, leaving them vulnerable to their own propaganda. They expected all their victims to be sneaky, cowardly and inferior, and they paid for that mistake.

Dehumanizing the new wave of fascists leaves us open to the same mistake.

The people committing genocide in Palestine are human, and it’s important for us to stop them by any means necessary, including killing them.

Unfortunately it initially made me think of the red triangle badges in Nazi Germany’s concentration and extermination camps.

Am effective protest needs to be disruptive.

What do you believe the (realistic) aim of the protest is mean to be? Its demand is obvious, but that’s different.

This is a sincere question, I don’t know the stated aims, if any. If its aim is to bring together concerned people and expose them to progressive groups, including socialists, then even a passive sanctioned protest can contribute to the labour movement.

You have to build dual power to organize things like strikes and work stoppages. That’s what hurts capital. The protests come after that.

Yes, although protests can complement that process of building dual power, they don’t have to come afterwards. Like you’ve said, protests on their own accomplish nothing, yet they can still be an important way to gain awareness and introduce a broader range of people to these politics and groups involved.

I am speaking generally, I haven’t paid attention to these No Kings ones, but they’d surely be an avenue for fresh faces to meet socialist parties among all the spectacle.

It’s pretty funny to see someone travel to a lemmy.ml thread and complain about lemmy.ml users being there.