Forgive me, but this position is one of absolute impotence.

Your solution is a "mass culling", but you are without the power to put such a plan into action. Furthermore, you know that this type of solution is unlikely to gain any sort of mainstream approval.

Further, why would in-laws need to be culled if your solution relies on genetically based criteria?

Personally, I don't think that greed or selfishness are traits of a psychotic mind. They are human flaws, present in nearly every person on this planet. You can't get rid of these traits - they are inherent survival instincts, found in all of us.

Right! I must have been high when I wrote that! 🤣

See, this is why I love real conversation! Now I'm learning something! Thanks for dropping by and sharing!

Fr, I'd never heard this mentioned. It's an all new take on the purpose of (state? local?) militias, for me anyway, I've got some reading to do now....

Yeah, sorry, sometimes my ADHD just randomly throws in a clown. I mean, an entire non-sequitur sentence.

Oh, I'm so sorry, I figured that one out. The ADHD hit bad yesterday....

SO MUCH great information here! Bookmarked for later, so I can pick through it later and absorb all of your knowledge. Because I'm like a sponge. Or maybe more like a leech....

The same reason that DeBeers doesn't flood the market with diamonds.

OPEC has always been about manufactured scarcity. It's not a bad scheme, if you have a heavily concentrated, limited resource. The difference, of course, is that oil is actually useful. So might as well pump it while you can, store it where it's easy to get and ration it out.

What is more, Saudi Arabia has 68 years of reserves at 2024’s production rate. The world will probably have stopped using hydrocarbons long before those run out. So any crude it does not pump today could be money lost forever.

1. Holy. FUCKING. SHIT! That is a lot of oil!

2. But the math doesn't check out. The world uses about 37 billion barrels annually. Saudi Arabia has ~260 billion barrels in reserve. That's more 7 years of global oil reserves. It would cover about 40 years of US oil use. And it would cover the modest Saudi annual useage for over 200 years. So no matter which way you slice it, the math is funky here.

3. Something else I just discovered. Saudi Arabia does not have the world's largest oil reserves. That honor goes to....drumroll....yep, you guessed it. Venezuela.

It's funny, I have very successful friends who used to say something similar. As one put it: "If you sell out at 20, you got no heart. If you haven't sold out by 30, you got no head."

That friend group are a great bunch of guys in their personal lives, family men and good providers, down to the last one. At the same time, they are 100% part of the problem. They are landlords and marketing execs. And every one of them has an exceptionally high EQ. (Except Jake. He's my favorite and he fixes industrial baking equipment. Used to be a bartender. You know the type - staring daggers when you interrupt his conversation with a regular customer. Jake didn't GAF about EQ.)

Anyway, it's not that they are evil. They are just the "normal" amount of selfish. They have comfortable lives. They read their newsfeeds without ever thinking any deeper. They aren't the Nazis - they are the people who empower Nazis by remaining laser-focused on their job and their family, ignoring politics unless their property tax is at stake.

I think it's possible to be a good husband and an overall good person, but not a good citizen. Zombies, if you will.

Someone did. They missed by inches. I would imagine they beefed up security a bit since then...

And, in most cases, it's a good thing that our head of state is well-protected. Otherwise, we'd have a new president every week and the executive branch would be a mess...oh....hmmm....

Edit: It's because I chose "Link" as the type of post. If I had chosen "Discussion", a URL wouldn't have been required.

I always do this - I ask questions first and click around later. JFC, I don't know if I've got ADHD or just come down with a case of boomeritis.

Thanks for this!

The field was marked required, with a red asterisk. I tried posting without a URL, and it did not accept the webform. Said I needed to fill in the required field.

I took a screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/gbF3jP3

(And if Imgur doesn't meet Lemmy standards, I'm happy to use a different service.)

Totally agree with you, a handgun is no match for a tank. If the military wants to make war on citizens, they will lose.

However, there is more going on that meets the eye. Many members of the military would not want to shoot their own citizens. And armed citizens can still do more damage than unarmed citizens. In other words, the 2A forces an authoritarian administration to use violence in order to repress the citizens. It ups the stakes. And citizens can strike in ways that the military can't. Guerilla warfare tactics. They don't need to "win", they just need to disrupt, to spread fear.

But, yeah, with the current surveillance state, along with the culpability of the media, it seems a dubious proposition that armed citizens can save themselves from the fascists. Regardless, I have suddenly become a HUGE proponent of guns. Especially when I see the Black Panthers providing security for demonstrators. Respect.