This is a form of argument known as reductio ad absurdum. I see it more and more frequently now, often in dismissal of a fairly throughtful point of view, usually with a mocking and disdainful tone, and therefore nuclear weapons are nothing to worry about.

I'm not sure if reductio ad absurdum was about my point or theirs but just to be explicit, I didn't say it wasn't a problem or a big deal, only that that threats and competitions are not new. I clearly didn't make a moral or ethical statement about nuclear weapons.

Jail is a medieval institution with state actor technology.

Even not knowing what “a Proctor” is meant to reference, I can immediately assume they are armed and interrogatory, and “Karen” described the situation to sound much worse than it was.

There's been a big and long running case of Massachusetts state police and the town of Canton police trying to frame a woman for the death of a policeman. Michael Proctor is a former state police detective who "investigated" the case.

At one point in the case, a large number of text messages between various cops was released. They won't make you optimistic about cop culture.

Cop culture is our culture, but with qualified immunity.

My point is the same either way. Thanks for the explanation.

I've really got to push back on the claim that cop culture is just part of mainstream culture. For starters, it is a self isolating subculture. It is filled with paranoia. Some cops would claim that's for good reasons and I don't disagree, though I might be thinking of different reasons.

Cops have an elevated rate of domestic violence and addiction. The self isolation and paranoia feeds into those problems. The extreme reluctance to accept oversight and accountability that every other part of government must accept is a product of that isolation and paranoia.

It's a subculture with distinctive pathologies.

Fine, but where are the studies showing the conclusion is false?

The conclusion is as true as the study shows. The conclusion was based on the questionnaire given to cops and their spouses in 1991 in some small town, those were the results. It's on other people who want to expand that to argue that 40% of cops beat their wives or whatever to show that it's true.

One trick state legislatures hate!

It is not at all like universal basic income, except that both of those are misleadingly simple quips.

Depending on what you or another means by "quality", it may not have any at all.

If GPS weren’t so universally available and precise, TPMS systems could be employed to read and record road section forces as location identifiers.

Theoretically you could do it with just wheel rotation data which wouldn't change conditions frequently like roads might. There's probably only one spot in the world where you can start driving, go around a somewhat circular road for 430 feet, have a left turn and go 251 feet, right turn and go 3451 feet

See Gemma 4 Edge models like gemma4:e2b