For both.

I mean…why would you want to?

WEG’s Star Wars D6 is fantastic.

Anyone can be insanely popular! Just gotta have an iron grip on the media!

If while acting in your own self-interest you knowingly, through action or inaction, allow others to come to harm, even indirectly, that is evil.

I think most Americans buy products made via unethical labor practices, and which damage the environment, harming everyone.

Are you really making the argument that the vast majority of Americans are evil?

While I won’t touch the subject matter with a ten foot pole, since I have a take that neither side likes…

It took me 20 minutes half paying attention to a meeting that should have been an email

Christ on a bike, I felt that one in my bones!

Not the least of which being that if they nuke it, they don’t get it. At least not in the way they want it.

But honestly, way theory aside, massive open warfare against Taiwan would be horrific for Taiwan, but outside of the region, it would really doom China as it exists.

Even if they did manage to take the island, likely with just an overwhelming wave of soldiers, at that point, the entire world, aside from a few exceptions (NK, Iran, Syria, Russia, Belarus, and maybe some African nations) are going to effectively strangle the Chinese economy with sanctions if not an outright embargo.

It might not change things overnight, but hitting China square in the economy is far more effective than it is for Russia, because China is so much more of a player in the world economy. They depend on the world buying their goods. As long as the rest of the world can keep unfulfilled consumer demand from triggering crippling sustained double digit inflation for years on end, there may not even be a need for large scale, near-peer open warfare.

I don’t necessarily disagree, but this brings up the next round of tough questions:

If your bodily autonomy is absolute, fine, but what happens when your choices and their impact start to spill beyond your own personal life?

If you want to go wild with hard drugs, okay fine, whatever. But when you need medical attention because of that decision, should insurance providers or the state be obligated to spend in order to treat you?

When your addiction costs you your job and support network, should the collective taxpayer have to subsidize your poor life choices?

I don’t mind the notion that individuals should have final say over what happens to their bodies, but that sort of assumption of responsibility, at some point, cuts both ways…and the flip side of some of these decisions would suggest that the individual should bear all consequences of their decisions…which seems unlikely in practice. We’re not going to see an addict rushed to an ER and the hospital toss them out into the street saying, “This was your decision! Sorry!”

And the mitigation measures seem equally unlikely to fly with the “strict bodily autonomy” crowd: increased insurance premiums or exception clauses in policies in order to keep expenses reined in for the rest of the policy holders/taxpayers who aren’t using their strict autonomy in a way that adversely affects others.

While it’s fine to conceptually discuss these decisions in a vacuum where it only affects the individual, in real life application, these decisions have impacts outside the individual in almost every case, which fundamentally shift the discussion.

In theory.

In practice, it has to be approved by your supervisor and is only for times when it won’t interfere with progress on actual work.

So all they’ve gotta do is give you a lot of work to do…or just say no…and you don’t get that anymore.

We need to allow

Oh crap, I guess we didn’t realize we were sitting on the remote with the button that prevented that!

Honestly, I appreciate the “good vibes” tone here but it’s painfully naive in any practical sense.

I mean, with Russia, it seems like it’s just been constant: WW1, revolution, WW2, Stalin’s reign, now this.

If anything, rather than WW2 and this being “in a row”, that time frame includes probably the biggest gap in the past century without a grievous population loss.

For as much as we (Americans) regard Russia (as a state) with an adversarial eye, as far as Russians (the actual common people) are concerned, I kinda feel for them. Seems like their entire history is dominated by difficulty, hardship, and death.

Then again maybe that impression is precisely the impression that the American education system has very carefully cultivated…