Are you trying to say: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." ?

Become terrorism? To answer that we'll first need to define "terrorism".

There are over 109 different definitions of terrorism. It is not only individual agencies within the same governmental apparatus that cannot agree on a single definition of terrorism. Experts and other long-established scholars in the field are equally incapable of reaching a consensus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism#Modern_definitions

A bit of an aside. Terrorism is a useless word now besides its propaganda value. The USA just declares whoever they don't like to be a terrorist, like how they just did to Iran's army, and now apparently they can legally assassinate any Iranian soldier. What's funny is Iran wants in on this propaganda game now, they designated the US army as terrorists.

I don't think it makes a whole lot of sense to talk about "assassinating" soldiers any more than "terrorist attacks" on them. Those are things done to civilians by definition. We certainly don't want to promote the idea that "collateral damage" is necessary for a military operation to be ethical.

I think terrorism has a perfectly good definition - political lobbying/influence "by other means" than conventional politics, i.e. attacking and terrorizing civilians. Doesn't matter who does it or how exactly.

Maybe the US government doesn't exactly use that definition, but that doesn't mean there is no such thing as terrorism.

If we killed some European general that was visiting some European country you would say that we had assassinated him.

"Visiting...some European country"

So, that's who this general was, an Iranian visiting some Iranian country? Was he there to see the fjords?

Anyway, telling me what I would think or say is unacceptable in a civil conversation. If I write something, you can assume I mean it, or you can disengage if you think I'm trolling.

If you're going to take my comments as justifying US actions, perhaps they can be taken that way, but they may apply to retaliation as well, no? Is there much of a gray area with military personnel in Iraq right now, who aren't Iraqis?

> What's funny is Iran wants in on this propaganda game now

Now? You might be missing some context on the whole Middle East conflict.

They designated parts of the Revolutionary Guard terrorists, which is not Iran Army.

Right after taxes become theft but before abortion becomes murder.

What if it comes out that he was coordinating with the Harris campaign to help get her anti-lynching bill passed which had been dead before the incident due to extremely low rates of lynching in modern America? They attended protests together and were at least familiar if not friends.

Whose safety is threatened by that law?

The scandal would be about everyone's safety being threatened when the cops' time is diverted by false reports for political agendas.

while no doubt this is grounds for jail time or fines, do you think a search of this depth is warranted? And how is that not wasting way more police time?

No I don't think it's a good reason to do such an invasive search.

Though I also don't think they should just drop the investigation if they have evidence there was a real crime committed (the false police report). I sure don't know anyone who committed a felony, got busted, but then was allowed to just walk away because it was a hassle to prosecute them. As for the effort, I'm sure they have some digital forensics tool that will search anything for them these days. Probably just one case among many that one person is working on at this point.

Without knowing the specifics of the bill in question, we shouldn't speculate.

At the time when libertarian lunatics figure out how to convince enough people to change the accepted meaning of the word "terrorism"?

I mean... you obviously don't like this, and many people agree, on very reasonable grounds. But it just is not terrorism.

It's sort of how boiled mushrooms are not "death", even though I have equal affinity to both concepts.

its not civil to call people lunatics because of their beliefs. and yeah, i said terrorism because it is a completely fickle, undefined term yet governments can use it to instill all kinds of violence. but when ordinary people use it they "have to define it". i can see the double standard.

It's not civil, but people basically have no idea how courts work and that discovery is a thing.

So "spectacularly ignorant" might be a better alternative to "lunatic", but that isn't polite either.

It's kind of like how Matt Levine was making fun of Carlos Ghosn today for saying "I was brutally taken from my world as I knew it".

``Yes, right, that perfectly and exactly describes the experience of every single person who is arrested and sent to jail. Very few of them like it! And he’s not wrong, it is a bad thing to take people away from their friends and families and everyday lives. It’s just, you know, that’s kind of the deal, with jail. In general society does not seem especially responsive to arguments of the form “I do not want to stand trial for these crimes, because I’d rather hang out with my friends.” ''

> but people basically have no idea how courts work and that discovery is a thing

are you saying that courts have become so opaque and inaccessible to voters that they exert their power as an impenetrable cabal ? Or that people need a PhD to assess whether the law or its enforcement is good or bad?

The courts aren't any more opaque and inaccessible than, say, javascript.

That's still really really bad, since everyone needs to know how the laws that they interact with works for a functioning democracy, but nobody who uses a website needs to know how the code is written. Courts should be orders of magnitude more accessible to people (especially in a country where people are tried by the jury of their peers!) than anything even remotely involving technology to the extent that a comparison between the court system and javascript doesn't even make sense.

90% of javascript is minimized/obfuscated. Imagine a society where 0.01% understands the law. Now imagine it calling itself “democracy”

Probably 0.01% understand Javascript, but there are a heck of a lot of computers, and practically all of them have a web browser.

Surely both programming and law are more accessible than at any prior time in the history of the universe.