The US has always been an electoral oligarchy. It paints itself as a democratic republic to claim that it has consent of the people it governs, but the governed are given no real choices. Would you like to take a right hook or a left hook? Sorry, not getting hit wasn’t an option.

We need to start demanding our cities and states use a ranked sortition approach. Put a lottery option on a ranked voting ballot and make politicians beat the lottery if they want to claim they’re a legitimate ruling class.

You have to make somebody suffer first.

On our side or theirs?

Agreed. I’m either the youngest Millennial or Oldest Gen-Z at 29 nearly 30. Gen-Z hasn’t reached the previous enlistment age of 35, so it’s entirely targeted at millennials. That said, it might be caused by Gen-Z’s unwillingness to enlist, so sorry our government reacted that way.

I can translate 'merican to English.

Value of the 2nd Amendment

There really need to be safeguards implemented to prevent actions like this from just being conducted on the turn of a dime without any awareness of others, discussion, etc. beforehand.

These systems and safeguards exist, but they remain inactive due to political capture and entrenchment. You can make all the laws you like, but they mean nothing when oligarch rule prevents enforcement or encourages inconsistent enforcement.

This is what I’m talking about when I say we’re not close enough to qualifying as a democracy for me to approve of our interference in foreign affairs. The people do not rule in the United States. We’re not a democratic republic, we’re an electoral oligarchy.

Worse, we seem to be choosing this. States choose how their elections work. We could switch to a ranked voting system with a lottery option without the federal government being able to do anything about it. Heck, a lot of individual cities could do it, but people aren’t engaged enough to overcome local entrenched powers much less state and federal ones.

Is there a solution to this whole government censorship problem? I don’t know networking, but it seems like the centralized systems get the central nodes shut down and the decentralized systems are too easily tracked and/or too inefficient. Reticulum looked interesting, but it was still pretty traceable, and appears to only really be for messaging apps since you have to know where you’re sending to already. Your motion idea has some merit to it, but I was kinda hoping for something more on the software side.

You know how Americans were making fun of Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine because it revealed that Russia had a super out-dated and under-maintained military? Yeah, about that… Turns out, we’re not so different after all. Not that I think we should be investing in the military, frankly we’re not close enough to qualifying as a democracy for me to approve of anything beyond non-interventionism.

Are we just grouping the whole EU as one entity then calling it a tie with china?

Well, the Drone Autonomous Warfare Groups (DAWG) requested a budget larger than the Navy’s, so I’m thinking it goes to whatever’s the current financial grift going around. AI these days.