Interesting article for a few reasons. I didn’t realize how much Pakistan was reliant on Chinese military systems.

Very challenging situation. To me seems like the thing to focus on is lack of electoral legitimacy. Maybe I’m using the wrong frame of reference coming from a larger country, but $8 million a year for a country’s leadership expenses doesn’t seem overly expensive. But I do understand being mad to spend any money on people who haven’t been chosen by the country’s citizens.

No. Stop being a dick

Yeah, it says they’re charging him with something that has a max sentence of five years, seems like it would be a lot heavier if they could show he was planning to take action.

Sure you can. I think it’s wrong to murder people for no reason. I say something like “government should avoid baseless murder.” Maybe I’m offending people who have deeply held pro murder beliefs, but I’m right and they’re wrong.

I’m making a joke here, but to illustrate the principle that just because a country has some tradition or practice doesn’t mean it can’t be criticized. There is such a thing as objective reality.

And of course we have to recognize that we ourselves can be mistaken about the truth so it’s smart to practice a degree of humility and introspection when it comes to people we disagree with. Even so, I’m pretty comfortable saying that laws which imprison people for criticizing a king are counterproductive and harmful to a society.

The reason why free speech is a good idea is because it makes error correction possible. People come at subjects from all different angles, and inevitably someone will misjudge a subject, while a person approaching from another angle has an insight that would be helpful. In other words, people make mistakes, and if it’s illegal to point out a mistake it’s unlikely to be corrected. I don’t follow the Thai monarchy but I’m sure it’s made mistakes, and it should be legal to say so.

I bought a size of pizza from a food truck in DC and it was so bad I threw it away. Which is saying a lot for pizza

I don’t think there’s a lot of those around here. Kind of off-putting because I knew it would be bad, and now have to live it.

Who are you addressing here

I had waited a long time to have any kind of personal experience of God, and finally gave up. Like they said, the holy spirit was supposed to work in you, I prayed for it and looked for it for a long time. Since it didn’t appear, no reason to excuse the problematic passages or shitty people.

One advantage as I understand it between a worker cooperative and an ESOP is that the worker cooperative has a one person one vote system. It avoids the issue you mention about not having voting shares. I worked at a place with an ESOP and just the managers had shares. And even there they didn’t prevent the business being sold to private equity. Sure they got paid out but now that previously family owned business is part of a monopoly in our industry.

You’ve got a point, but I’m not sure many johns want to be filmed in the act…

What does the phrase mean?