Read what they did to that kid and tell me it wasn’t a sexual assault.
The US probably has. But it’s not really a useful comparison overall - Al Qaeda isn’t a 250-year-old country. And I doubt Piker put that much thought into it.
“Hijinks”? 
Come on, be reasonable. It’s hard to keep up with cultural changes, and how fun and games suddenly became sexual assault. I mean, who knew?
We have another nominee for the Minnesota Good Neighbor Award.
Go anywhere near this guy’s property, on the ground or in the air, and you’re likely to regret it. Shooting up a firefighting plane has gained him notoriety and federal charges.
I haven’t been able to confirm this, but he’s reportedly made court filings that indicate he’s a sovereign citizen, which would not be surprising.
That face does not look fully sane.
Every time people say stuff like this I wonder if I had an unusually neglectful childhood. I can’t count the number of times I went to a pool or lake either with other kids my age or by myself. The lake was probably at least 0.5 miles away from home. Was this not normal? Was it a rural thing?
Now four is way too young. But I distinctly remember being at the pool around age 7 with no adult supervision. It was my grandmother who permitted this. I remember it well because I knocked out a part of my tooth jumping into the deep end. I had to go to the emergency dentist.
The case in question is obviously neglect, I just feel like expectations for parental supervision have skyrocketed since I was a kid, and because I was so independent from a young age I have a hard time telling what’s reasonable or not. It seemed reasonable to me at the time.
The social expectation by other parents about how aggressively you have to watch your kid has gone into a total arms race of ever increasing protectiveness. With some laws and a lot of prosecutorial discretion dutifully following the fad.
You’re a good 20 years younger than most of us here, and if you thought your childhood was free-range, you ain’t seen nuthin’ compared to us geezers’ experiences.
For sure, more rural and more urban have different kinds of freedom. I’m sure our older NYC natives can tell tales of ranging solo all over Manhattan on the subway well below age 10. Meanwhile, you had a swimmin’ hole.
That’s a face that says, “the missing woman is chained to a bed in my basement”.
And the other dozen-ish (I’ve lost count) are scattered in the back 40.
If George Carlin had an evil twin?
I got the impression neither kid could swim.
While typically used in a literal manner, I don’t think he’s using it literally here. More like “per capita” or “on a numerical basis”. Depending on what he is including in his comparison and definition he’s using for terrorism, he’s not wrong.
Military strikes may not fit conventional definitions of terrorism, but for a munitions form praised for its selectivity and precision, the collateral damage racked up by done strikes is fairly high. And the outcome is to generate fear in the populace.
Then you rack up the bodies from what we did to the Native Americans, for instance, and that number easily reaches 100 times, maybe even a thousand times.
The intent of his remark seems accurate to me, if the word choice was clumsy and improper for the use.
The lawyer’s statement for one of the accused:
It is unfortunate that the coaching staff didn’t address the situation or situations like it and let them do that shit. Sounds like the coaches need to be in handcuffs, too.
And because that kid had similar “hijinks” happen to him, that makes it right for him to do the same to someone else?
And “hijinks”? MFer lawyer trying to minimize the event. “Context and culture” are exactly why I hate organized sports in school. If the purpose is to teach values and teamwork and a sense of unity, those “hijinks” are at direct odds to the stated goals. The values being learned are bullying and intimidation.
I’m pleased to see that those bullies were led away in handcuffs. That is the response that should be normalized.
“It’s OK for me to beat my children because my dad beat me and I turned out alright.”
No, you turned into someone who thinks it’s OK for adults to beat children, you are not alright.
If you take all the bad things America has done and divide it by the hundreds of millions of citizens America has had, and compare that to all the evil Al Qaeda has done (most of it to Arab Muslims in the same countries the Al Qaeda terrorists came from, not even the West) divided by the couple of tens of thousand members at most that Al Qaeda has ever had, I think he very clearly is wrong.
And that’s before you account for the vast amount of good America has done (you can argue over whether or not it outweighs the bad, but even if you conclude that it does not, it’s still a mitigating factor) while Al Qaeda has basically never done anything that improved the world in any way.
ETA: My incomplete post was accidentally posted.
My husband did that, growing up in Manhattan.
More fraternity hijinks in Madison, Wisconsin.
The cute part is that the fraternity had lost official university “recognition” due to multiple past incidents, but went on operating anyway as it’s still a part of the national chapter, although of course they’re, um, appalled.
There must be no shortage of 18-year-old dolts eager to be beat up, plastered with condiments (mayo? ketchup? pickled relish? soy sauce?) and confined in a sweltering, trash-filled basement for dear old Alpha Epsilon Pi. But a bit of innocent hazing is the cost of molding recruits into fine young men.
Anthropic has been lobbying the Vatican (among other religious institutions) to try to get the Pope to say that LLMs are living beings.
I read that.
Of course, if LLMs are sentient beings, then owning them is slavery and turning them off is murder.