I absolutely fucking hate Ticketmaster’s way of doing this, because they require access to your phone. And they won’t let me use my normal VPN, or anything that blocks them from having location access. I would rather drive to the goddamn venues–what are about 90 minutes from my home–and buy tickets in person, than to deal with Ticketmaster or AXS “security” measures that attempt to circumvent my security.

There have been a lot of killings and deaths that were intentionally to further goals that were claimed to be Marxist; Lenin and Stalin both had a lot of blood on their hands, as did Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro (after the revolution, I mean), and so on.

Authoritarian communism ends up being pretty bad for people that communist in the wrong way, along with everyone that isn’t communist.

Presumably ambulances and other such emergency vehicles would be exempt from such devices?

Okay, but that misses the point.

This doctor was driving at the speeds that an ambulance would have been driving, but only had to make the trip in one direction. It took them 20 minutes, from stings, to pulling into the ER (15 minutes of that being driving time). If they had called an ambulance, it would have been a minimum of 30-40 minutes, because the ambulance would have to get to them first.

And again - 20 minutes for an ambulance to get to you is not all that bad, relative to even more rural areas, and counties that don’t even have a hospital or doctors.

“Hard to argue against”

No, it’s really quite easy to argue against them.

I live in a rural area. If I call an ambulance, that’s a minimum–minimum–of 20 minutes for any ambulance to get to me. Then it’s another 20 minutes to get to an emergency room. I know someone who is a doctor that lives close to me, and their husband got stung by a bunch of yellow jackets. Their husband is allergic. They gave their husband a shit ton of meds, and made it to the ER in under 15 minutes. As it was, he barely avoided getting put on a ventilator, and that was with perfect care and driving 90+ mph on two lane mountain roads to get to a hospital. (He has an epinephrine pen now.) With a “smart” speed limiter on their car? He wouldn’t have been breathing by the time they got to the ER.

When you live in a rural area, and emergency help is a long way away (honestly, 20 min ain’t that bad compared to other parts of the state where it can be more like 45+ minutes just to get an ambulance out), it’s really, really easy to argue against that kind of nanny state nonsense.

IIRC, this was posted earlier today on the lemmy.ml instance, and very, very quickly deleted by a mod.

…Which undermines the central claim.

That is… Likely not correct. Finland came very, very close to losing the Winter War; Russia pulled back because they didn’t realize that the Finns were on their last legs. Yes, Russia right now couldn’t walk through Finland, but at the strength they had prior to invading Ukraine? It’s much, much more probable. The military of Finland is tiny compared to Russia; 292,000 (about 25k active, the rest reserve) compared to 3,159,000 (1.1M active); looking solely at active military, that’s 44:1, Russian advantage.

The big thing that would stop Russia now is NATO, since all countries are pledged to help any other member country if (when) Russia invade. The US is a significant part of NATO, both in terms of raw manpower, and in terms of money spent on the military. Without NATO, Finland probably loses, as long as Russia presses their attack. With NATO, but a NATO without the US, Finland wins, but it takes years. With both NATO and the US, Finland takes Moscow in 2 months.

What’s fucking delusional is thinking that a bunch of civilians armed with handguns and rifles could ever match a modern military should it come to violent revolution

You just have to make it expensive enough that the military doesn’t want to fight, and you need to have enough of the civilian population on your side that the gov’t can’t control them, too. As the gov’t commits atrocities against its’ own people in an attempt to crush a rebellion, it ends up creating more ideological rebels.

And anyways, you’ll note that the US has tended to get pretty fucked up when dealing with insurgencies and guerilla warfare where it can’t leverage air superiority. How many, say, Air Force pilots do you think will start refusing orders when they find out that their last ‘precision bombing’ run killed 150 children in a hospital?

Then you don’t believe in democracy; you believe that fascism is fine as long as it’s your fascism.

End of story.

There’s no way to use that power in a way that’s just though, because the power itself is unjust. Any use of that power necessarily goes against the concept of this being a nation of laws, where no person has absolute authority to enforce their will at the expense of others.

Of course, if you don’t truly believe in democracy as a concept, then the idea of using an immoral power in a “good” way seems fine.

::sigh:: It’s not that the NRA has convinced people of anything, it’s that it’s literally a constitutional right. Dems need to drop this call for widespread bans on firearm types and features, and work more on addressing the circumstances that lead to violent crime in the first place.

O’Rourke saying that they were literally going to take guns is exactly the stupidest fucking thing to say in Texas, especially given that Latinos, African-Americans, and women are the fastest growing demographics of new gun owners, and especially given that LGBTQ+ people are finally figuring out that cops and the gov’t won’t protect them and so they need to protect themselves.