That’s what usually happens during a war… Hezbollah is effectively the army of Lebanon. The fact that Lebanon’s government does not officially call it that does not change the reality on the ground.

Let’s put the issue of Israel aside and consider slavery in the USA before the Civil War. There was plenty of oppression but effectively no resistance. The deadliest slave revolt (for white people) involved about 60 casualties before all the slaves involved were quickly captured and executed, and this revolt was so out of the ordinary that it shocked the nation. Almost all human beings do not in fact rise up against their oppressors when they think that doing so will just get them killed. When there’s no power vacuum left by a weak central government, an organized insurgency has no room to form and so people will tolerate anything.

The idea that human nature includes an unquenchable flame of defiance may be appealing but it is simply false. Otherwise we’d see insurgents in North Korea.

You hold the common belief that insurgency is motivated by revenge, but history does not support it. The historical record is full of extremely brutal conquerors who faced little to no sustained resistance after their initial invasion. It’s harder to say what does lead to insurgency but it appears to be simply the weakness of the central government, regardless of its brutality or lack thereof. (Local cultural factors are also important but they are not decisive.) The example of the USA in Iraq is illustrative: the USA overthrew Saddam Hussein with relatively little loss of civilian life and ended his brutal practices. One might think that Americans really would have been greeted as liberators, but in fact they faced a far more persistent insurgency than Hussein ever did.

The American victories over Germany and Japan in the second world war involved massive civilian casualties, including from deliberate indiscriminate attacks against population centers. Despite this, American occupation of both countries had none of the problems that the occupation of Iraq did, and in fact the USA was able to turn both countries into strong allies during the lifetime of the people who had experienced the war. The difference seems to be that the USA co-opted existing power structures in Germany and Japan, whereas it dismantled Hussein’s power structures and then failed to rebuild its own.

One relevant example of an invader actually triumphing over an insurgency is Russia in Chechnya, where Russia was extremely brutal. Israel faces a similar challenge but with far more restrictions on its treatment of the Palestinians (despite many critics’ foolish use of the word “genocide”). I’m not sure that Israel will succeed, but if it fails then that would not be because of the reason you expect.

It disrupts the ability of Hezbollah and its allies to respond to an invasion, but it also might be enough on its own to convince Hezbollah to back down. A simple ceasefire would accomplish Israel’s objective against Hezbollah (whereas it wouldn’t against Hamas) so an invasion of Lebanon isn’t inherently necessary.

It’s good to see Israel’s intelligence apparatus function effectively. I hope disrupting the chain of command starting from the top will make a ground invasion of Lebanon unnecessary. I also hope the conclusion that Iran’s leadership comes to is that they are themselves personally quite vulnerable in the case of a direct conflict.

licensing issues

I understand that the buyer doesn’t lose the de facto ability to install the game from a local copy of the installer, but is it possible to lose the de jure right to install the game in that way due to licensing issues on GOG’s end? I’m not saying it is, I’m just curious.

Less documentation means more job security.

My issue with this is that it works well with sample code but not as well with real-world situations where maintaining a state is important. What if rider.preferences was expensive to calculate?

Note that this code will ignore a rider’s preferences if it finds a lower-rated driver before a higher-rated driver.

With that said, I often work on applications where even small improvements in performance are valuable, and that is far from universal in software development. (Generally developer time is much more expensive than CPU time.) I use C++ so I can read this like pseudocode but I’m not familiar with language features that might address my concerns.

I didn’t claim that politics don’t matter at all to anyone ever. That would be a silly thing for me to say.

The outcome of the election affects many people, including me. Whether or not I’m well-informed about everything “kamala” and “trump” do affects no one, since I’m not even an undecided voter in a swing state.

Almost anyone can ignore all those things without it mattering.

I’m pretty sure the few people who can’t aren’t on Lemmy.

I do find myself shopping at corner stores a little more than I used to, specifically because they have plastic bags. I wonder if they’re exempt from the law or just ignore it.

According to the article, the use of plastic for bags has actually gone up despite the ban.

I’m not sure this is going to be any more effective than the original (ineffective) ban. Maybe I’m biased because I don’t like carrying bags around so I am accumulating more and more “reusable” bags that I never reuse.

Alanine. No baroque ornamentation, just the beauty of simplicity. A timeless classic.

Battletoads

literally impossible to beat (in 2-player mode)

not the herpetology-themed NES game in the meme

The population of Tuvalu is about 11,000. I think the fate of these islands is very far down the list of reasons for urgent climate action. Maybe poignant human-interest stories like this one do some good because they attract public interest, but they don’t actually focus that public interest onto important matters.

The US has never sent soldiers to fight for Israel during any of Israel’s previous wars, even when Israel’s continued existence was in extreme danger. Therefore I think American boots on the ground are very unlikely. Even in the case that the US military intervenes directly, that intervention will probably be limited to long-range aerial attacks.

Your argument is reasonable, although I don’t think the fact that Google is aligned with the USA and Western Europe is a coincidence. This anti-trust action is itself a demonstration of the power that the US government does have over Google, and Google knows better than to provoke the use of that power. Anti-trust law is largely a matter of the government’s opinion rather than objective rules, so Google has no effective legal defense other than keeping the government’s opinion of it favorable.

I don’t think Google could get away with deliberately manipulating elections in the way that you propose. Even if it were to tilt the outcome from one established party to another, that party would not be beholden to it. (If the party that it helped knew that it helped, then unless that party controlled Google, it would rightly consider Google a threat rather than an ally.) Furthermore, manipulating elections would have a huge risk of being revealed and facing devastating blowback. Engineers rather than the board of directors are the ones who actually make Google function and those engineers would be neither oblivious to nor loyal to some plan for domination by the board of directors.

With that said, I disagree with you primarily because I’m very risk-averse when it comes to matters like this. Right now, the “juggernaut like Google that is The Internet” is working in our favor and if we break it up then we won’t have a juggernaut working in our favor anymore. We would be better off if we were able to accomplish what you propose while retaining dominance of the internet, but IMO the reward is not worth the risk of forfeiting that dominance. Those who are losing need to take risks but those who are winning should not, and right now the USA is winning.

I don’t see how this is bootlicking. I don’t gain anything from saying it; it’s just my sincere opinion. The USA as it is now, with the tech billionaires, is very rich and very powerful, and this does benefit ordinary Americans and not just tech billionaires. My impression is that many people on Lemmy focus on the problems in the USA and lose perspective of how good it is here compared to pretty much everywhere else. There’s a reason why so many people are desperate to immigrate, and that’s because they will be better off here even as poor Americans.

I expect some people are going to think of countries like Sweden where the standard of living is claimed to be better than it is in the USA. I’m not convinced that it actually is; I’d rather live here than there. However, even if people in Sweden do enjoy a higher standard of living, it’s because they benefit from the world order established and maintained by the USA since the second world war. Their defense and their access to international trade is subsidized by the USA. (That’s one thing Trump is right about, although the way he went about saying so was foolish because it undermined the perception of NATO unity that is so important.) If they USA declines, Europe will decline with it.