You seem surprised that this is how losing trust works. If people don’t trust you will keep your promises, then it doesn’t matter what you promise them.

That being said, there are thing they can do that are not just virtue signalling.

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Assuming you mean publicly, no argument with that.

But the goal is to reduce consumption, and it will work.

Yes, but the black market has serious sides effects. You have to compare the disadvantages of allowing people who want to smoke to smoke, damaging their own health vs the black market funding cartels, mafias, and/or other criminals, causing problems for everyone.

Putting aside that you are comparing the secret service from 45+ years ago vs today. A lot of the time when they do their job, you will never know. How many times did someone with a gun see agents guarding the approach they wanted to use and turned around, no one ever knowing? If there was an officer guarding the roof as there should have been, chances are we never hear of this incident.

Ah, so this was a planned operation with Trump in on it, but entirely relied on the secret service being incredibly incompetent and getting incredibly lucky. Because the guy who managed to get elected president twice despite being in the Epstein files and in the middle of multiple prosecutions is so incompetent he let some random psycho shoot around him with no plan…

Does this include Biden? Since he controled the secret service that let this happen? No way this could be a conspiracy without him being in on it. Even if the secret service went behind his back, no way he wouldn’t be able to investigate such a fuckup and expose the conspiracy.

Because without 270 votes, this could result in states that sign having even less impact, resulting in them not signing. As an example, imagine it goes into effect immediately. Now as a candidate, you have two options.

Option 1: Campaign and make promises in a state that signed and the only thing you get is more overall voters to win the popular vote and therefore the electors of states that signed. But winning the popular vote is not enough. You still need electors from other states.

Option 2: Campaign and make promises in states that did not sign. Convincing voters here not only gives you votes for the popular vote, but also for the states electors. So you gain votes both towards the electors of states that signed and this state that didn’t.

Now where would you campaign and make promises?

Who said national law doesn’t exist? You break national law, decent chance you end up in prison. That’s real enough, even if not perfect. But what happens when you break international law? 99% of the time, nothing. And in the rare cases something does happen, it’s usually not really because of the law. It’s because countries have incentives independent of the law that make them enforce it. Often, the enforcement being illegal as well. That’s not really law, that is a bunch of outlaws shouting at each other with pipes in their hands, threatning each other.

Pretending for a second that international law really exists, it is defined by international treaties. In this case, it would be UNCLOS.

Well, that is against UNCLOS, but while Iran signed it, they did not ratify it. So, kinda not really.

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Except that they are completely legal, you are correct.

And yet the article cites no source for this and as far as I can tell, there is no official source excluding Iran. Only the same BS that ammo is usually not carried during excersises which obviously does not apply to live-fire excersises, which Milan 2026 was.

So unless you are suggesting we should be trusting what Iran says, I revert back to there is a good chance it had some ammo.

More importantly, what does it matter? The US military wouldn’t have known for sure whether the ship had ammo or not and no reason to check. Even if it did not have ammo at the time, it would just re-arm in Iran. It was a legitimate target regardless, just like a bomber returning home after dropping bombs is a legitimate target, even if it does not carry bombs at that time. If you let it go, it will pick up more bombs and bomb you again.

PS: No idea why people feel the need to make shit up to paint the US in a bad picture. You want evidence of a US warcrime?

US secretary of war Pete Hegseth has said that “no quarter” will be shown to Iran

There it is. Just making that statement is a violation of the Geneva conventions. This is because it discourages surrendering, by suggesting surrenders will not be accepted/treated well, which in turn results in more deaths than necessary.

Let’s put aside the stupidity of the idea that they should have allowed it to re-arm first and risk US lives for no reason.

The training mission had a live fire component, so the ship was definitely armed during a portion of the excersise. Unless they ran out of ammo or something weird happened, it was armed.

It does not change anything about the fact your definition is so broad it can fit almost anything. So yes, it is nitpicking.

Yes, nitpick on the exaggeration of all things. Extremely good faith argumentation. Because if one village or city or country is excluded from the genocide, that makes such a big difference. /s

What do you mean you defined it?! You just listed 3 things that it isn’t! What does that mean? How is anything decided? How are people motivated to do shit without money? How does society work at all in a stateless system? You defined nothing. By your “definition”, genociding all humans would be communism since it would remove classes, states and money.

What is? The fact that not one person advocating communism actually dares define what they mean by communism? So they just jump from definition to definition to salvage losing arguments? Sure, extremely bad faith, but what you gonna do?

If you consider firefighters communist, you have extremely weird (broad) definition of communism.

PS: Also, in the context of

I don’t think we really had communism yet on the world.

arguing about broad definition of the word when we are clearly talking about a very narrow definition just muddles and confuses the discussion.